As some of you may know from reading the forums, we’ve been working on improving Goplan’s speed. So, today we rolled a few changes to our servers that we hope will enhance the experience for everyone. We did a few tests ourselves and we do notice a speed enhancement, but we want to hear from you. How fast is Goplan, and where in the world are you?

As always, we are committed to having the best experience possible, and hearing from you plays a big part in that - so let us know if you have any comments.

There’s a lot of updates coming down the pipe soon - if you haven’t seen this post and our roadmap on the wiki, have a look now -, but we’d like to talk about some of the future possibilities for those of you who want to customize Goplan (particularly the Goplan UI).

Although quite a lot of people seem pretty happy with our UI (which is great), I can’t stop thinking that the green must shock a few of you - so we’ve been thinking about ways to allow users to customize how Goplan looks. So we’ve done a few changes and voilá, theme support. Here’s a first theme, easier on the eyes, built with around 20 lines of CSS:

We’re thinking about the possibility of having a series of pre-made UI color choices, and also allowing you to customize your own CSS. We’ll probably make a couple of follow-up posts about other features coming soon. Keep an eye out.

Those of you who’ve been waiting to hear about what we have planned for future updates to Goplan, smile! We’ve just opened the Goplan documentation wiki, which includes our product roadmap, as well as the beginnings of end-user documentation.

Cut to the chase - Upcoming features!

You can see everything in detail on the wiki, but here are the highlights of what’s coming. We’ve been listening to the feedback you all sent in through emails, comments, blog posts and in the forums. Here’s what’s on the plan based on that:

• Enhanced dashboard - We’ll be redesigning our dashboard so that the information actually makes sense if you run a lot of projects.
• Company scope - Allowing users to create company-centric spaces for projects, with logo and color customizations.
• Backing up - Backing up, exporting and archiving projects
• Project templates - A way for people to set-up project templates. Example: if you’re a webdesign firm with a specific process, creating a template with preset task lists, etc should be simple.
• File versioning - Storing several versions of files. This is particularly important for users who keep updating certain files in their projects
• Full feeds - Showing full information in RSS feeds, so instead of “Ticket created” you’d see the whole text for the ticket in the RSS file itself

These are just a few of the several things we have on the slate. Some aren’t going to be easy and will take some time, but we want to get this list out there so you know what we’re working on.

Why make the roadmap public

Some people will wonder why we’ve decided to open our product roadmap considering this is a “closed” source project with several competitors out there. There are several reasons:

One, we want to make sure people know we haven’t stopped working on this product. We started it because we needed a collaboration solution, and that need didn’t just fly away - we want to make it kick ass for everyone (that’s us and you).

Two, we live and breathe feedback - its the main ingredient to a successful product. As everything we’ve done lately, the planned feature list is up for discussion. We want to know what to do first, what we’ve missed, and how to best serve you.

Three, we want you to be as excited as we are - and by putting this out there we’re pretty much committing ourselves to build what we planned. This way it’s out there and we need to get cranking.

About the wiki and documentation

Finally, also on the wiki is the start of end-user documentation (there’s already a lot of documentation for those of you who want to use the Goplan API). We think Goplan’s easy to figure out on its own, but we know its comforting to know there’s actually written documentation just in case. We’ll be sharing some tips and tricks, use cases and other helpful bits to it.

That’s it! Long post, sorry guys. Go through the Wiki, keep an eye on the forums (there’s some interesting discussions going on) and most importantly, enjoy!