After the launch of Editorial, several readers have asked me whether there was a good way to browse workflows shared by other Editorial users. While Pinboard has provided a good temporary solution with bookmarks and tags, you’ll be happy to know that developer Ole Zorn has launched a beta of the Workflow Directory, which will be deeply integrated with the next version of Editorial.

Right now, you can search for specific workflows in the Directory or view Staff Picks and Recently Added workflows; select a workflow, and you’ll get the usual preview page where you can tap a button to add someone else’s workflow to your Editorial library.

With the Workflow Directory, the default behavior of Editorial’s sharing feature is changing: shared workflows will be posted online but won’t be listed in the Workflow Directory unless you manually publish them there. This means that, when unlisted, only people knowing the direct URLs to the shared workflows will be able to find them. This is exactly what I’m doing with the extra workflows included in my Editorial book.

The best part of the Workflow Directory is that it’s got an API to programmatically search workflows, download them, and get descriptions. It returns data in JSON, so, if you bought Writing On The iPad, you should be able to adapt one of my existing workflows that use the request module to work with the Workflow Directory API. Zorn has already made a workflow to search and download workflows (as usual, meta).