We’re working on a new Kanban plugin that will be more feature rich than the existing theme component and give us a more solid foundation on which to build and improve going forward.
Some of the features we’re planning for this new plugin include:
Allow admins to create and configure boards with a purpose built UI
Allow cards to be sorted by priority within columns on a board
Allow floating cards to be created without topics
Allow admins to control different levels of access to boards to specific users and groups
You can see an example of this new plugin in action here on meta now:
Something I’m wondering about as we get closer to publicizing this more widely is the name.
kanban
This is what we’ve been calling it going all the way back to the theme component that’s been out for some time. It feels a bit jargon-y to me, but on the other hand, it’s a relatively well known term at this point.
boards
Many products refer to similar feature sets simply as “boards”. we do this ourselves currently to refer to the boards themselves within the plugin. perhaps the plugin itself should just be named “boards”? on the other hand, in the forum world, “boards” often refer to “message boards”. would that be a poor choice in our case?
something else?
Perhaps you have another idea about what to call this. If so, let us know!
I really like where this is going, and I’m super excited! We use this feature extensively on our forum, for multiple purposes.
I think so, yes. We’ve had our forum for almost 10 years now, its official title contains “Discussion Forum”, and it is still regularly referred to as the discussion boards. This would cause a ton of confusion.
ehhhhh, I don’t know about that, to be honest. Definitely to more tech minded people, and perhaps people who perform their labor largely on a computer, but outside of that it’s not been my experience that it’s a term known much at all.
I don’t know if I have helpful suggestions on the name. We use it not only for planning projects but also as an approval & workflow pipeline for requests, so “projects” doesn’t quite fit, but maybe it does for most others.
Honestly after seeing the plane icon I thought of “boards” as “strips” because my brain is weird, it made me think of landing strips, and how the cards travel from strip to strip in order to reach their final destination.
Thanks for sharing that perspective. Makes me more compelled to pick something else.
Yeah, “projects” was another one that came to mind for me at some point. But I agree it feels a bit limiting. But maybe.
You said “workflow” up there, but we’ve recently given that name a different meaning.
Boards still really does feel like the best, plain language option to me at the moment. But I hear you about the confusion it could cause in the space we inhabit
I am trying the plugin. I found it very promising and I am super excited to be allowed to test it. I found some features that probably can add value to the experience with it, and I share my thoughts:
What about adding a batch of topics (not by tag but manually choosing them) to boards instead of one by one?
This is the first limitation that I found in my first drafts and experimentation into it. Perhaps it was not originally with this in mind but can be extended to more use cases this way.
Other ideas that come to mind, with no particular order:
Note that I am using Horizon and my experience could change a bit from Foundation.
Allow clicking on a board’s card to enter the board, not only from their title.
Display the solved icon in solved topics, the assigned icon in assigned topics, and the closed icon in already closed topics. It will free tags for different actions.
Make the full-screen toggle be really full-screen in Desktop, or disable it. Now it is a little confusing (in Horizon) and it is not giving a proper full-screen experience.
Calendar integration for weekly view, allowing to arrange the cards between them, especially for created events. Proper integration with the Assign plugin as well.
Extensive workflow integration for automatically adding, updating, and moving topics between cards, and cards between boards.
In a non-intrusive way, indicate that the cards can be scrolled horizontally. Once users get used to the panels, it’s no longer necessary, but if this view is used by default in categories like support or features, newer users might get lost.
It occurs to me that a simple, subtle CSS gradient line that appears only once per session might be enough. I know that eventually the design team will figure out the most effective way to handle this.
Allow moving topics/cards freely between columns. Again, it is probably not the design principle, but it is very useful for teams with more informal work structures, which are based primarily on experimentation and adaptive change.
Regarding the plugin’s name, I’m glad you’re considering it, and I agree that “Kanban” is —and at the same time isn’t— widely used. At least when looking at different communities, outside of those that typically follow processes and procedures with the support of project managers or similar staff.
I’d just like to add a few words that I think could describe this great functionality (avoiding commercial terms and focusing on functionality): To-do, Task, Status, Activity [Boards].
Trello, and similar ones, are using Planner. But those aren’t Kanban solutions, but close — yet kanban is the most common and de facto actual name for that kind system. I’m not sure if you guys have real need to try re-invent a wheel again You started with a kanban and this new one is the same.
Of course, I am thinking about a ‘Move to…’ UI option that allows moving cards from their actual column/board to a different one. It should be available from the dots that currently only show ‘Remove’.
Perhaps I am missing something, but it was not possible for me to move cards easily between columns or boards. Could this be related to the tag UI display? In that case, I hope it will be possible to mix the two behaviors: starting initial columns from tags but also allow to move cards out from this initial arrangement design.
The use-case could be related to moving cards/topics between different departments. So a support ticket then will be sent to be a design one.
The most polished design on the plugin should allow moving cards freely without selectors within the columns ornboards, like the recent approach in the sidebar where one just ‘moves’.
This is awesome! I just requested that it be installed on my site
Coincidentally, our business is moving away from Asana, and I found Planner (free version) lacking, so just last week I dusted off my old theme-component-based Kanban board. I’m probably just drinking the Discourse Kool-Aid, but I’m definitely going to pitch this as an option for any internal teams looking for an Asana replacement.
With that in mind, my hopes are that there are:
Assignment of tasks is different than ownership of a topic (I assume this is possible with the “assign topic” functionality)
Ways to set due dates (a’la bookmark functionality)
Methods of logging status/detail changes
I built an automation that auto-logs if a category/tag changes so that my MCP can more easily build reports and track the journey of a project.
Yep, you can use assign here, and the assignee(s) will show up on the cards. Note that you can assign posts within a topic in addition to assigning the topic as a whole to a person.
This is not something we have in there yet. Probably need to dive a bit more into what you’re thinking here in a Contribute > Feature topic.
Posts in topics are a good start. Changing tags / moving columns would be next. We do log some activity like this, so tinkering with what you can and cannot extract via Data Explorer may be informative.
I do have some hopes and dreams when it comes to this space myself – I’d love to have two things: 1) a kind of board wide “activity stream”, and 2) board history stored as snapshots of the board state.
(1) is something I think many products do already, so should feel familiar if we do it.
(2) is not something I’ve seen before, but I feel like it’s within reach and could be quite powerful. I’m imagining it opening the door to two things: a) having permalinks to a given board state (e.g. for linking to “current state” in a periodic updates from a topic), and b) having something like a “scrubbable timeline” where you could see how the board has changed over time.
Not sure (2) will happen before other things become more important, but it’s something I’m keen to explore if we can make space for it.
A way to filter to specific tags would be great. I,e if I wanted to see all tasks that are applicable to “ABC” tag, a filter would let me see all applicable cards.
The ability for cards to pull in any checkboxes throughout the topic. Currently, only the original post is pulled into the card. It would be cool to be several posts into the topic, create a checkbox [], and have it be pulled into the card.
It would be great to be able to interact with these checkboxes from the card view as well.
The ability to quickly add a reply to the corresponding topic via the card
If a column is based on a tag, have the column label replace the standard tag so it’s not repeated:
We’ve been discussing more internally too, and there are certainly folks who share the concern that boards will cause some confusion, but on the whole I still think it’s the right tradeoff.
We’ve got a PR open here to merge the plugin into core as a core plugin, with the new name:
You started with a kanban and this new one is the same.
