Trello organization



  • Cards in Trello have 4 "dimensions": collection, labels, members and due date. By dimension, here I mean the category of metadata you can attach to your cards.

    I use collections to separate cards between stages (pending, high priority, active, done...). I use labels to separate between different skillsets required (eg. Frontend, Backend, etc.). Due date and users are used in the obvious manner.

    All fine and good.

    Except, the bosses have decided to fork the project for a new client. So now I need to have some features belonging to Fork A, some to Fork B, some both. Basically, I need another dimension added to the cards.

    At first, I organized cards into different collections (Fork A pending, Fork B pending, Both pending), but that isn't working out so well. There are either too many freaking columns, or the information is lost as you move the cards into "common" columns.

    I'm considering changing the system in some way, but I'm not sure how.

    I suppose I can add forks as labels, but that probably won't be distinctive enough. You'd need a map to figure out what all the colors mean. Or maybe I should use multiple boards? Is that even feasible? Or maybe just hack the names of the cards in some way?

    Any suggestions from the more experienced Trello users are welcome.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Except, the bosses have decided to fork the project for a new client. So now I need to have some features belonging to Fork A, some to Fork B, some both.

    So why not just fork the entire board?



  • I'm not an experienced trello user, so I may be disqualified, but you also have stickers that you can attach to a card.

    Otherwise, I'd have gone with either a label or a distinction in the name...



  • @JazzyJosh said:

    So why not just fork the entire board?

    Two boards seem like potential pain in the ass. Also, I couldn't have cards that belong to both forks.

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    I'm not an experienced trello user, so I may be disqualified, but you also have stickers that you can attach to a card.

    Otherwise, I'd have gone with either a label or a distinction in the name...

    Good idea!

    Unfortunately,

    • Free users only have crappy default stickers. And it seems even paid customers can't specify their own.
    • Once you slap a sticker, you can't change it or remove it (!?)


  • @cartman82 said:

    Unfortunately,- Free users only have crappy default stickers. And it seems even paid customers can't specify their own.- Once you slap a sticker, you can't change it or remove it (!?)

    I agree; the ones I saw looked like shit. I was hoping there was some way to upload your own or that the paid ones were better (and that you had access to them).

    I don't remember how, but it is possible to remove them. I eventually managed to get rid of the one I slapped on to a card to test it.

    Can you change the background colour of the card? Make it even more clown-vomity?



  • You can upload an attachement with a cute fox to indicate wich fork it is. 😄

    /me wanders off to see if trello supports emojis in card titles, and not just images/image links in the description field...

    Edit: gosh darn it. You can use emojis in the description but not in the title. Bummer.



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    I agree; the ones I saw looked like shit. I was hoping there was some way to upload your own or that the paid ones were better (and that you had access to them).

    I was mistaken, you CAN upload your own stickers if you are a paid customer. Not likely to happen for us, though.

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    I don't remember how, but it is possible to remove them. I eventually managed to get rid of the one I slapped on to a card to test it.

    I tried everything I could think of. Nope.

    Those stickers are here to stay.

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    Can you change the background colour of the card? Make it even more clown-vomity?

    Nope.

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    You can upload an attachement with a cute fox to indicate wich fork it is. 😄

    /me wanders off to see if trello supports emojis in card titles, and not just images/image links in the description field...

    Edit: gosh darn it. You can use emojis in the description but not in the title. Bummer.

    Yeah, tried that too. Can't do anything special in the title, not even basic styles.


  • FoxDev

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    a cute fox

    /me waves a paw

    hello!


  • BINNED

    @accalia said:

    hello!

    you spelled Trello wrong!

    Right from the Trollo!


  • Fake News

    @cartman82 said:

    I use labels to separate between different skillsets required (eg. Frontend, Backend, etc.).

    We actually tended to put "Frontend" / "Backend" in the title or description and then used labels for the project stuff.

    YMMV, and it's been a few years since I last used Trello.



  • Not a Trello user, but what you're talking about is a co-product (also known as a direct sum). You can implement one by adding a dimension and mappings. But it's complex. You can't escape the complexity unless the language/database intrinsically supports direct sums.

    For example, Haskell implements the direct sum of the types a and b as

    data Either a b = Left a | Right b
    

    (so an either value is either an a tagged with Left or a b tagged with Right).

    SQL does it with outer joins. (But it's kind of clunky).

    Presumably, Trello will have to do it with outer joins too. Or else you're going to have to find a way to implement mappings in the app-layer, and do it the complex way.



  • @JBert said:

    We actually tended to put "Frontend" / "Backend" in the title or description and then used labels for the project stuff.

    YMMV, and it's been a few years since I last used Trello.

    I have reduced labels to just 4 (Frontend, Backend, Bug and Misc), but that's still too much to use them in text descriptions.

    @Captain said:

    ...

    I... umm....

    Ok. FYI this is Trello.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7pau0JcCsU

    You can drag the little cards around and organize your projects, and add labels and smileys and chat with your coworkers.

    I don't think they support co-product of direct sums using functional syntax.



  • (Psst-- Trello is project management software. It's like a virtual scrum board.)



  • Duh. He still needs to implement a co-product, using either Trello's app-layer or the database.



  • I don't think you underst-- you know what? Never mind. Whatever.



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    I don't remember how, but it is possible to remove them. I eventually managed to get rid of the one I slapped on to a card to test it.

    Figured out how to remove stickers!

    You need to click on the card edit button. For some reason this is an entirely separate mode than card view.

    With this, I can give the sticker system a try. I'll use stupid yellow star to mark issues for Fork A, and idiotic pink spaceship for Fork B. So we'll see how things go.

    Marking your answer as solution.



  • Now that I am back at a real keyboard and have tested it, I think I would go with attaching an image instead, if I were you (provided of course that you don't already use this for something else). This even works with drag and drop.

    And the only reason for this is that the default stickers are butt-ugly.



  • Yeah, the sticker idea failed terribly in the end. I mean, I could use them just fine, but the board looked godawful ugly with those stupid things all over the place. Second, all the cards suddenly took twice as much space. Third, unlike labels, you can't filter by a sticker. So it was just a disaster all around.

    Images sound like they will suffer from similar problems. Also, some of my tickets have screenshots and such. So I would need to make sure that the fork label is the first image added. Sounds kind of fiddly.

    Right now, I switched everything over to labels. I managed get it down to just 6 labels overall, so the system is kind of working ATM. It's not ideal (I'd like to be able to distinguish between fork and "normal" labels), but it's the best solution so far.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Images sound like they will suffer from similar problems.

    Indeed. There is no filtering or anything on attachements.

    @cartman82 said:

    So I would need to make sure that the fork label is the first image added.

    Not necessarily. There's a link "Make Cover" by every attachement that lets you decide which to use as cover (or none at all).

    Just for completeness I tried the "put the fork in the title" avenue as well. The best I could do was to start every card with [Fork#A] The title of the card. This looks reasonably well on the board, and you can filter with it (Space or underscore won't work in the forknames).



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    Just for completeness I tried the "put the fork in the title" avenue as well. The best I could do was to start every card with [Fork#A] The title of the card. This looks reasonably well on the board, and you can filter with it (Space or underscore won't work in the forknames).

    Yeah, I was thinking about this as well.
    Maybe even add a custom CSS style to turn this into something decent.

    Might give it a try at some point.

    @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    Not necessarily. There's a link "Make Cover" by every attachement that lets you decide which to use as cover (or none at all).

    Oh! TIL.



  • @cartman82 said:

    custom CSS

    If this is an option, then use it to selectively display text on some labels (your fork labels) but not all...



  • @Mikael_Svahnberg said:

    If this is an option, then use it to selectively display text on some labels (your fork labels) but not all...

    It might be an option for me. But for other people that come and go, using all sorts of different browsers and devices, and with different skill levels... not so much.


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