Our first class on how to create simple workflow apps

For some time we've been showing users how to create their own forms using the wonderful Swiss Army knife of Plone tools: PloneFormGen.  We even gave our first formal PloneFormGen class last November.

Yesterday we built on the success of our PloneFormGen deployments by showing a small group of experienced Plone workflow application users how to create their own simple workflow applications using PloneFormGen and two recent products we created here: uwosh.northstar and uwosh.pfg.d2c.

North*

North* is really a two-part product:

1. The Workflow Manager gives you a simple, streamlined user interface for creating workflows (ie. defining states, transitions, permissions, roles, even a checkbox for sending an email on a transition).

2.  The Workflow App Generator lets you bundle a PloneFormGen form and a workflow together into a downloadable Plone product that you can install as-is into another Plone/Zope server or that you can hand to a Python programmer to further customize.

In yesterday's training we used only the first part of North*, the Workflow Manager, to define a simple custom workflow containing two states and one transition that included an email notification action.  It was all point and click; no coding required at all!

D2C

The somewhat oddly-named uwosh.pfg.d2c ("pfg" for PloneFormGen, "d2c" for "data to content") product lets you add a new kind of saved data adapter to a PloneFormGen form.  The new adapter, which we refer to as a "D2C", takes each form submission and turns it into a fully-fledged Plone content type containing all the form fields as well as the values that had been entered into the form.

With the D2C product you can therefore catalog, search for, and retrieve your form submission data in a completely Plone-natural way.

Outcome

We created a simple PloneFormGen form, added a D2C adapter to it, and assigned the custom workflow to that D2C adapter.  The result: whenever someone fills out and submits the form, a new Plone object is created that contains all the submitted values, and this Plone object has the initial state and available transition as defined in the custom workflow.

Our goal is to allow our campus business users (Plone power users who are also experts in their unit's business processes) to define, create, and maintain their own online business workflow processes.

For More Details

Please use the link below to the related how-to that has all the detailed instructions for creating your own workflow application through the web.