A little known (but amazingly powerful) feature of Goplan is the ability to mark any two things(*) as related by using tags. Example: Lets say you have a task, and want to associate it with maybe a couple of discussions and a couple of other tasks or files on Goplan. By associating these assets, you’d have direct links to the others when looking at each individually. Quite powerful indeed - and the best thing is, you can start using this functionality right now. Let me show you how:
Here’s what happens in the video: we’re creating a new task, and using the tagging functionality, we add tags for each of the items we want to “connect” the new task to. This is easy by using autocomplete. Type in a “d” and you get auto-completed discussion titles. Type in a “t” for tasks and tickets, etc. You can use the arrow keys to navigate suggestions, and enter to select one.
When we finally click to view the new task, you’ll see that the items we’ve selected are listed in the Related items section of the task view. Give this a try on your own accounts. Hope you like this tip!
(*) There’s virtually no limit to the number of things you can associate ;-)
As you may know, Goplan allows you to send emails that create new tickets automatically, and also lets you comment on items by email directly by simply replying to the notification emails you get. Some people have a bit of trouble using this functionality, so we thought we’d help out with a post.
Making sure your email gets to us
Always email from the email you login with: For security reasons, we only allow tickets and comments to be created by people who’s email addresses are on Goplan, so make sure that when you’re emailing, that you’re emailing from the email address you login with into your company space.
When emailing tickets, make sure you’re emailing the right address: The address that you email tickets to is special and private. You should never share this email address (unless you want to explicitly give other people the ability to create tickets in your projects - which is certainly okay for some projects). You can find the right address to email new tickets to by going to your project’s ticket creation screen and looking in the sidebar. A screenshot is above.
We hope these two tips help you make better use of the emailing functionality! We’ll be posting more tips soon - there are quite a few lined up.
These have been a few long days for the team here, but it was worth it, because we finally get to announce the latest features on Goplan - some of which I’m sure will make many of you happy. Here’s what’s new:
Tickets can now be associated with milestones: Since we first built Goplan, we allowed associating tasks with a particular project milestone. Many of you - quite correctly - suggested that we did the same with Tickets. So now we have. Milestones can have both tasks and tickets associated with them. Project managers now have more control over what needs to happen in order to hit a given project milestone.
Projects can be exported in XML: One of the questions we got more often in our support email was if it was somehow possible to export a given project, for archival or backup purposes. Our answer was always “you can always use our API, but we’re working on something better”. That something better is here. You can now click “Export” next to any project in your company’s projects list to get an XML formatted file you can keep. Being committed to letting people export anything they add to Goplan means we’re really happy we’re finally announcing this feature.
New credit card processing: We revamped our plan page completely, and now allow credit card payments - no more forcing you to create and maintain a Paypal account. If you do have a Paypal account you prefer to use, we’ll still let you do it - but if you don’t, your life is now much easier.
Better text input: We made it much easier to input correctly-formatted text into Goplan. You don’t need to use Textile anymore, or save a comment multiple times to get the format right. What you see when you’re typing in a new comment, a ticket description, discussion or task content will be exactly what you get after you save. Hopefully this makes it much easier for you to collaborate on Goplan.
Other tweaks in the code:
We also did a number of smaller tweaks in the code that hopefully will help you guys. For the curious, here are a few of those changes:
UI updates on many screens
URLs typed in comments now hyperlink automatically
Task due dates can be removed again
Fixed a typo in the document category screen
Comment box is now cleared after typing and submitting a comment
Fixed a typo in the subscription warning email
Keep sending us your feedback:
This update will hopefully make your lives a little better. We’re very happy about the new ability to export projects, new text input and better ways to subscribe to Goplan. We wouldn’t be able to do this if it wasn’t for your great feedback so keep it coming. As always, we’re listening to your thoughts on Twitter as well as our support email at [email protected].
We’re deploying brand new code to Goplan, and for the next 15 minutes things may be shaky. Everything will be back to normal soon, so keep an eye on this blog and our twitter feed for updates. To know what’s coming after our gnomes leave the server farm, check out this blog post.
Update 1: We’re done! Enjoy the new functionality.
Update 2: Some people have mentioned that some of their comments are now unstyled. We are aware of this. The system is still processing all comments - it may take a while to get to yours (we have a huge database) but we’ll get there and everything will look perfect in a bit.
