I’m glad to announce 1.0 release of django-viewflow and django-material libraries, that took about 3 years of my part-time work.

Viewflow is the reusable workflow library for Django, that helps to implement people collaboration software. Viewflow takes best parts from two worlds. It is based on BPMN — business process modeling and notation standard. And plays well with modern web development toolchain.

We had such movement for sysadmin tools, that have become DevOps scripts, there are tons of ETL software that adopt the code-first approach to construct pipelines, instead of UI. Non-interactive computational job workflows use code to construct workflows for a while. Why we have to stuck at clunky UIs for people workflow automation?

Over several years, while working in banking and web development industry I have been keeping that idea. In 2010 I made a simple solution, the django-fsm library to address the problem. It became quite popular in the Python world and now has about 3k downloads per day.

In 2013, after I found several abandoned attempts to made a generic workflow library for Django, I decided to start my own project.

Viewflow provides the DSL for new explicit workflow layer, in addition to standard Model-View-Template in Django. With Viewflow you can construct a human workflow directly in code. It doesn’t disrupt your development process, Just commit, unit-test, put into staging, and then production as usual.

Django-Material is the reference UI implementation for the Viewflow workflows. It takes care about site navigation, solves complex form construction for Django, and provides shortcuts to build CRUD like Django admin, but with your own class based views. With django-material, for many cases, you don’t ever need to write a single line of HTML.

The core of django-viewflow and django-material libraries is available as open source projects on the Github

I would like to thank all customers of the PRO version. They helped me to drive forward and don’t give up early. The whole project is much bigger that I can support on a free time.

To see viewflow in action, you can check Viewflow Demo Site. Viewflow Cookbook contains several deep customization samples source code. I would like to say special thanks to Bryan Oakley, Johannes Hoppe, Cameron Mochrie, and Martin Hill for the support. I hope the overall mixed software distribution model will make possible to provide sustainable development and evolution for the viewflow in the future.

I hope you will also try and enjoy Viewflow!