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Introduction

What FlowWP is, the parts every workflow is made of, and how a workflow runs inside WordPress.

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FlowWP is a WordPress plugin for building automations visually. It watches for something happening on your site — an order, a form submission, a new member, a published post — and does what you would otherwise have done by hand. You build each automation by placing steps on a canvas and joining them up.

The parts of a workflow

An automation in FlowWP is called a workflow. Every workflow is made of steps, and every step is one of three kinds:

  • A trigger starts the workflow: a WooCommerce order is paid, a WPForms form is submitted, a user is created, a webhook call, or a time on a schedule.
  • Conditions decide what happens: branch with If / Else, split several ways with Switch, or stop a run that does not qualify with Only continue if.
  • Actions do the work: send an email, create or update a post, change a user’s role, tag a contact in your CRM, post to Slack, or call an external API.

Every value a step produces is available to the steps after it as a token, such as {{ trigger.order.email }}. The editor has a picker for them, so you never need to remember the names.

How a workflow runs

  • Nothing runs until you activate it. A new workflow is a draft. You can build it, test it and change it; it starts responding to its trigger only when you switch it on.
  • It runs inside WordPress, on your server. Workflows run on WordPress’ own hooks. FlowWP contacts an outside service only when you add a connection to one, such as Slack or Mailchimp, or use a step that needs it.
  • Work happens in the background. Runs, delays, schedules and retries go through Action Scheduler, so a visitor never waits on your automation and a workflow that waits three days does not hold a request open.
  • Every run is recorded. Each execution keeps which steps ran, what each was given, what each returned, and where it stopped if it stopped.

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