Workflow has been an important piece missing from CiviCRM. We figured that integrating with the Rules module in Drupal would address this problem. I decided to tackle it on as a weekend project :)

Kudos to the rules developer, Wolfgang Zeigler for designing AND documenting an excellent module. The developer documentation is very comprehensive and along with the integration modules, i was able to write an integration module in a few hours. The source code for the module can be found in our svn repository

We hope to address and answer some of the integration questions with the community, similar to how the Views Integration Module has been developed. CiviCRM has got pretty good hook support, so I suspect adding extensive rules support is very feasible, i.e. fire rules based on CiviCRM hooks. We need to answer a few other questions to help us move this integration forward in a fruitful manner:

• Data types to expose? Exposing all the top level CiviCRM objects as data types makes sense out here. Pretty much the same set of objects/tables that Views exposes (Contact, Contribution, Participant, Member, Activity)
• Events to fire? Firing a rules event for all operations (insert,update,delete and view) on the above objects seems reasonable. We should also fire an event on a form submit (so an action could redirect the user to a different page)
• Default actions? Some basic actions can be: add/remove from a group / tag, create a "object", send email with the object values, log to table/file, create/update an activity to reflect the change made (suggestion by DaveJ)
• Default conditions? Compare two objects, contact in group/tag, object with value V in field F
• Passing variables to other actions? This is a useful feature and should allow us to pass data from one action to the other. I suspect we will use this extensively as we add more actions and conditions.

I'm struggling a bit with actions / conditions that make sense and are useful. Let me know if you have any ideas on what will be useful in this context. If you can help build out this module and implement some of the functionality above that would be great and highly appreciated. Ping me on IRC if you can help. This definitely has the potential to take CiviCRM up to another level :)