Add a category for workflows

Contribute Sitefeedback
1

I am very excited for the workflows feature and I anticipate using this to greatly expand the capabilities of my forum.

I do think this one feature if well maintained will have a large community making automations and for that reason I think there should be a workflows category in this meta forum. Users could share or get help making workflows or make node requests.

I personally would like to see some features:

  • send message to user in chat
  • Create/Delete categories
  • Plugin API (more on that later)

And more will likely come down the line as I experiment with Ideas.

The n8n forum has a custom plugin that allows you to see flows in a thread, This kind of feature would be great for the workflows category for collaboration and troubleshooting/support.

n8n also has discourse nodes that feature parity would be great, and even interoperability with those nodes would be cool, like using an n8n node call as a workflow trigger.

What I mean by plugin API, is having the ability to add nodes with a plugin. One idea I have in mind is the gamification plugin could be used to expand the points feature to allow dynamic behaviors like adding/removing points based on interactivity with the forum.

5 likes
2

Now that this is live on the LTS release I will leave some notes in this thread of things I come across that I would consider missing features or bugs (missing as in, no feature parity with n8n exists)

  • The HTTP request block doesn’t have a pagination function
  • The data transformation blocks split and aggregate from n8n don’t have discourse workflows equivalents
3

We have summarize node now (not yet on LTS though) which should answer your aggregate needs.

4

I think the suggestion is reasonable. I agree, there’s probably plenty of room to be sharing workflows here. We’ll certainly consider it.

Maybe it deserves to be its own category in Customization, e.g. #customization/workflows.

In the meantime, I’d suggest two things:

  1. Contribute to this topic: Show us your Workflows if you just want to riff and share in a very informal way.
  2. Use topics in #customization/extras tagged #workflows for sharing in a more curated way, for example, for sharing workflows you think might deserve more ongoing attention, support, and maintenance.

Tags are a good way to incubate a new category. If we see that gain momentum, it’d be a natural next step to promote it to a new category and move those tagged topics over.

I think this would make a good topic in Contribute > Feature tagged workflows. If you have suggestions for improving the workflows feature overall, that’s a good way to get them on the record, and let people discuss and vote on them.

Are you on the LTS / ESR (esr) release?

I think given your interest in this space, it’d be good to get onto latest. That way, you’ll have a faster feedback loop as things continue to evolve.