I’ve been using Directus for a while and experimenting with Flows. While Flows are powerful, I find that for many simple tasks they introduce unnecessary complexity and make it harder to understand or implement straightforward operations.
I believe that instead of focusing heavily on Flows, it might be more beneficial for the Directus team to invest in improving the extension and developer experience. Some potential improvements could include:
Making extensions fully typed, so developers get better auto-completion and type safety.
Simplifying the testing and deployment process for extensions.
Providing clearer documentation and tooling for creating custom extensions.
In many cases, developers want to achieve simple tasks efficiently, and Flows can feel overcomplicated for that. Improving the extension ecosystem could empower developers to write custom logic that is easy to maintain, test, and deploy, without relying on complex Flows.
I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on whether a shift in focus from Flows to a stronger developer/extension experience might make Directus even more powerful and accessible.
Thanks for sharing this @Arman_Hadi! I believe our product team has logged your request originally from GH Discussions and shared that enhancing our docs is acknowledged as a top priority. Also interested to hear if anyone else has thoughts on your proposal
Personally, I love Flows and we use them extensively.
However, they are not without their problems, and for anything that involves lots of conditions and loops, I tend to just use a Flow as a listener, and then send the data out to an external python function with a webhook and have that do the logic. That works pretty well and saves us messing around with extensions.
I should really dig into writing extensions though so anything to make the process simpler would be welcomed.
I’d be sad to see Flows sunsetted though. They are 85% of the way there, and I feel with a little bit more love they could be made so much easier to work with so much more powerful.
IMHO, there are Developers who are Directus users only, and have no intention of becoming Directus extension developers. These are different audiences. Flows was a major feature and greatly helped us in choosing Directus as our preferred backend CMS. But we don’t intend on becoming extension developers.
Last of all, it seems that there are 2 requests for improvement in this post, which could be complementary — it’s not an ‘either/or’ situation, but rather a situation where having both would be desirable:
more and expanded Flows features
easier and better documented process for developing extensions
