AlphaFlow 1.0 (Sep 27, 2005)

AlphaFlow 1.0, as a drop-in replacement for DCWorkflow, is able to manage complex business processes as well as typical community publication workflows with a default Plone 2.1 installation.

For additional information about this project, please visit the overview page .

Available downloads

AlphaFlow 1.0 Source Package

For all platforms (344kB)

Release Notes

Tested with Plone 2.1, Plone 2.0.5
State Final release
License ZPL
Release Manager Christian Theune

AlphaFlow is an activity-based workflow engine for Plone. It manages tasks to be performed on content objects. Outstanding features of AlphaFlow are:

  • a simple workflow definition format
  • reusable components with exhaustive standard library including task assignments, decisions, scripting, email notifications, time based triggers, recursive publication, and more.
  • easy modelling of complex workflows thanks to decentralized flow control
  • individual workflows for each content object
  • parallel workflows
  • flexible management of user assignments as well as permission and role mappings for content objects and tasks

Change log

New Features

  • When the environment variable ALPHAFLOW_RAISE_ON_FALLOUT=1, the workflow does not silently fall out but raises an exception. This is very handy when debugging workflows or the engine.
  • Added ability to assignable work items to redirect the user to a URL based on an expression after completing a workitem. See completion_url_expr.
  • Added differential permission/role changes. You can now specify to add/remove a certain role from a permission without having to state all other roles as well.
  • Added parent activity. It continues with the parent of the given activity.
  • All BaseAssignableWorkItems now support a content_role. This allows giving local roles on the content to users while they are assigned to a work item.
  • Every workitem can spawn other workitems just before it is started (startActivity in activity definition)
  • Split Assignees role into Assigness (which only applies to workitems) and ProcessUser, which applies to the process instance and the content object. Workitem actions are protected by HANDLE_WORKITEM.
  • Added Demo Product
  • Included early preview of the visual workflow editor. (Requires FireFox 1.0+ for SVG)
  • Improved documentation
  • Major performance improvement: introduced cache for dynamic local roles to avoid excessive calls to listRelevantUsers
  • WorkItems have a "view URL" now, which can be used to define the page to handle the WorkItems more precisely.
  • Added configuration activity, replacing the implicit workflow configuration on start of a workflow instance.
  • Enhanced EMail activity, recipients can now be specified by roles.