Official ideas list address is http://drupal.org/node/236135
For more information or to ask questions about this proposal, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/9883.
The idea is to make the idea behind yahoo pipes (see http://pipes.yahoo.com/) possible from within Drupal. This would not involve doing the same things as yahoo pipes does, but rather capturing the essence of that idea and Drupalifying it.
The module would need to:
* Have an API function that cleanly executes all the steps in the pipe.
* Have an interface for organizing the pipes' various inputs and outputs. While this does not have to be as fancy as yahoo pipes, it does need to at least avoid thousands of page reloads and millions of nested fieldsets.
* Have a hook that allows modules to register candidate steps with the pipe.
* Have implementations of the hook for useful parts of core
* Make the core module do absolutely nothing but construct the pipe and execute the pipe; doing stuff with the executed data needs to be able to be done through separate modules.
* Have two additional sub-modules, one for displaying the output of a pipe as a page, the other for displaying the output of a pipe as a block.This project aims the union of both. Allowing users to create charts (bar graph, a pie chart) using the data from Views.
Difficulty
Medium
Comments
This makes more sense with Actions + Rules
Pipes as a UI for Rules was one of the ideas behind this issue: http://drupal.org/node/397218
Transformations
I finally committed the Transformations module (with the "CSV Transformations" and "Drupal Transformations" extensions upcoming) to Drupal CVS, which does indeed provide means (and an elaborate API) to manage and execute operations in a pipeline. The interface is still pretty crappy though, and there's lots of room for improvements, new operations, etc.
I think anyone interested in this project should base her or his proposal on Transformations. I'll post a custom-tailored "community idea" soon.
done
Here's the idea page. Hope you like it!