CCK_emailer: the field that is a verb

(Please see the attached 4 sketches)

The basic idea of cck_emailer is to create a cck field type that lets you define an email address to which to mail any new node created that implements the specific cck_emailer field type.

How could CCK replace webform, and would you want to even do this? The purpose of this post is to vet an idea. There is no working code yet. This is also not an attack of any kind on the webform module, I'm just using it for comparison of what this would recreate and in order to tell if this would be any better than what the webform module already does.

When looking at the webform module, there are many components which are fields much like cck fields (text, number, file, email, etc.). Webform lets you assign who the form submission (whether that form is a survey, contact form, etc.) gets emailed to.

The email target for a cck_emailer field could be:

static - address(es) defined by the admin when making the cck field
dynamic - defined by the user while they're making the node
nodereference-controlled - based on email fields found on referenced nodes. (this is the harder one to explain, but hopefully the attached mockups do it justice).

Such a functionality, if feasible, could take the place of webform, and could make it easier to implement email-campaigns, like letter to the editor campaigns, where newspapers with associated email addresses are the referenced node type, and letters to the editor are the nodes being created by users and emailed to newspapers.

This assumes making a lot of things nodes, but I see this as the working data model in Drupal and it's not so bad that the content of these nodes are not so strictly content for viewing like on a normal website.

You can then use views for showing the emails that have gone out, and the node that's getting emailed (like a letter to the editor) could consist of whatever cck fields you want. This begs the idea of a node_email_template module, that lets you define a template/format to use when a node is being send through the cck_emailer functionality (something else does the sending, like the send module, or drupal itself) and a node_email_template could be defined by letter the user place %field_name around a textarea much like they define the "forgot your password" email on admin/user/settings.

What's missing from cck_emailer:

emailing attachments?

Possible challenges:

knowing what the node consists of if you're sending it upon submission (maybe do the sending on cron?)
what else can't this do that webform does?

Other ideas:

this could work well with the views_selector module by Mark
could you easily hide the nodereference form and prepoulate it for the user based on a selection they make, like from a views_selector form/list, on another page in Drupal?