Rules Monkey: Update #3

This is the third update of the Rules Monkey Summer of Code project. The enhancements for the Rules Scheduler module are now finished and have been reviewed many times by my mentor and me. (see the issue for patches and details). They will be comitted to the official Rules CVS development branch in the next days. All developed code is also available in the rulesmonkey CVS, see the rulesmonkey project page) to download a complete modified Rules package (for you impatient testers and patch haters ;-)

Lessons learned:

• CVS is extremely painfull. Have you ever tried to create a patch which includes creating a new directory? No? Be glad. I use a Subversion (svn) clone of the Rules CVS repository to create my patches now.
• PHP date handling creates headaches. The function strtotime() treats arguments as local timestamps, if you want it to consider them as UTC dates, you have to do some tricks.
• Review your own patches. Do not blindly create a patch and post it to the issue queue immediately. Have a look at it first, which saves you from posting follow-ups that just clean up minor mistakes in your own patches.
• It is amazing how wonderful Drupal and Rules are implemented while PHP is such a bad programming language.

Future work for the next week:

• Start a tutorial page for the Rules Scheduler module to reflect the functionality and the new features (see this issue).
• Plan and think about the Rules form support, start coding it.