Drupal publishing queues

Have you ever wanted to create a 'queue' of content that would be published at a regular interval? I have.

It seems like this should be one of those things that should be nice and easy to do with Drupal: Set up a nodequeue, schedule some kind of rule to pop the first item off the front of the queue and publish it. But try as I might there just didn't seem to be any kind of nice integration between nodequeue and rules. So I investigated adding Rules integration to Nodequeue, and it looked far from simple, so I decided to write my own simple add-on to Nodequeue.

Nodequeue publisher

This is a really simple module that just adds some settings to each Nodequeue and on cron respects those settings. Basically you can choose some days on which to enact the publishing action, and a frequency for publishing on those days, every 6 hours, every 1 day, etc. On cron the module will publish the first item from the queue and remove it from the queue. Simple.

I hope that proper Nodequeue integration will come for Rules soon, and then we'll be able to use Rules to create these really simple kinds of publishing workflows, as well as much more complex ones if they are needed.