How Workflows Work

Borker has three workflows. Each does a specific job. Run them in order: weekly to plan, daily to generate, process-approved to schedule.

Daily workflow

The daily workflow is the core loop. It runs once per day and generates content for that day's calendar slots.

flowchart TD
    A[Start Daily Workflow] --> B[Load today's calendar slots]
    B --> C{Any slots for today?}
    C -- No --> D[Exit: no content generated]
    C -- Yes --> E[For each slot...]
    E --> F[Decision Engine: select topic from pool]
    F --> G[ContentGeneratorService: call Claude API]
    G --> H{Auto-approval on?}
    H -- Yes --> I[Status: approved]
    H -- No --> J[Status: pending_review]
    I --> K[ApprovalService logs item]
    J --> K
    K --> L{More slots?}
    L -- Yes --> E
    L -- No --> M[Workflow complete]

Step by step:

1. Load slots: CalendarService reads today's calendar_slots rows (day of week matches today)
2. Select topic: For each slot, the Decision Engine scores all eligible topics and picks the best one
3. Generate: ContentGeneratorService calls Claude with: topic, angle, platform, content type, brand config, and voice attributes
4. Route: Depending on your automation setting, generated content goes to pending_review or directly to approved

Expected output: One content item per calendar slot. If you have 3 slots today, you get 3 content items.

The Decision Engine

The Decision Engine selects which topic to use for each content slot. It avoids repetition and balances your topic pools.

Scoring factors:

The highest-scoring eligible topic wins. If all topics have been used recently, the engine picks the least-recently-used one.

Weekly workflow

The weekly workflow plans ahead. Run it at the start of each week.

What it does:

1. Reviews the upcoming week's calendar slots
2. Identifies content items that can be recycled (older high-performing content that's due for another run)
3. Flags gaps where no content is scheduled
4. Optionally surfaces recycling candidates in your approval queue

The weekly workflow doesn't generate new content. It sets up context for the daily workflow to work from, and updates the Decision Engine's recency scores so the daily workflow knows what's been used.

Process Approved workflow

Process Approved finds all content with approved status and schedules it via Postiz.

What it does:

1. Queries all approved content items
2. For each item, SchedulerService calculates an optimal posting time based on platform best practices and your scheduling config
3. QueueService sends the item to Postiz via the API
4. Postiz assigns a postiz_id, which Borker stores in the content item's metadata
5. Content status moves to scheduled

Run this workflow after a review/approval session to batch-schedule everything at once.

Cron setup

You can trigger workflows manually from the UI, or set up a cron job to run them automatically.

Recommended schedule:

• Daily workflow: Every morning at a fixed time (e.g., 6:00 AM)
• Weekly workflow: Monday morning before the daily workflow runs
• Process Approved: After the daily workflow, or after a manual review session

See Running Manually for how to trigger from the UI.