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.

Mentors:
cwgordon7
(awaiting secondary mentor)

Note: This is a challenging task, but also (hopefully) a fun one! cwgordon7 is guaranteed to be free all summer, so you will not be without help!