Beyond State: Complex Business Processes in Plone with BPMN 2.0
For over two decades, Plone’s DCWorkflow has been the gold standard for state-based content management. It is flawless for moving a document from Draft to Published, but struggles when tasked with orchestrating complex, multi-actor business processes with parallel task execution, conditional branching, timer events and more. Having built those fragile workarounds time and again, we now humbly recommend accepting the inherent limitations of the CMS. Instead of fighting the framework, the real solution is to embrace activity-based business processes using the executable BPMN 2.0 standard alongside an external, open-source process engine.
Details
This talk introduces the basics of the BPMN 2.0 standard, demonstrating how it serves as both a visual communication tool for business logic and an executable code format. Rather than replacing Plone's built-in content workflows, we will explore how to seamlessly augment Plone using Operaton, a community-driven, free, and open-source BPMN process orchestration engine. Attendees will be introduced to thinking in activities instead of document state, learn the absolute basics of modeling executable processes, and see these models brought to life natively inside the CMS through a proof-of-concept Plone integration add-on.