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.
Our team’s been busy working on many things (including the iphone/ipad app - more news on it quite soon), and we’re almost ready to launch the first batch of changes. Here’s a few of the things that are about to be updated on Goplan:
Text input will change dramatically. Many of you (and ourselves) had problems with the way you write comments, discussions, or fill things like task descriptions. Textile, which we use for text input is “okay” but far from a perfect solution. So we rebuilt our text-input from the ground up. You’ll now be able to preview things *as you type*, instead of having to guess how things would look like after clicking “Submit”. The screenshot above reflects those changes - we think you’ll love it.
More flexible ways to subscribe. We’re finally ready to offer more payment options as an alternative to Paypal. We’ve spent the last few weeks looking into every nook and cranny in order to allow you to securely subscribe using any major credit cards directly from Goplan - effectively dumping the need for a Paypal account. With this major update, we’ll be ready to give out promotional codes, have more flexible payments, and be easier on you. We can’t wait to launch this.
There’s a lot more coming in the next few days - we expect to launch these changes first thing next week. We’ve been getting an unprecedented number of feedback emails (thanks! keep them coming!) and have been doing quite a few tweaks based on your awesome feedback. Keep an eye out on this blog and our twitter feed for updates!
A few of you have been waiting for this for quite a while, so here’s some good news: Now you can attach files to any comment on Goplan. No more linking to remote files, or uploading files, then copying links just to show that new design. Now you can include files straight from comments to discussions, tasks, tickets, or other files!
The feature is already live for all our users, so feel free to start using it right away. We hope this improves the experience of discussions on Goplan. As always, feel free to send us your thoughts and feedback. There’s a lot more coming, so keep an eye on our blog!
While work continues on large things like the iPhone app and a revamped permission system, we decided to roll out a few minor features we’ve been working on. So about an hour ago we updated Goplan with the ability for administrators to edit profiles for the whole company - something people have been requesting for a long time - and better filtering on the time-tracking screen.
In the next few days we’ll be rolling out more features we’ve been working on, including the ability to attach files to any comment anywhere on the application, which should make it much easier to collaborate from anywhere inside the app - like discussions, tasks and tickets. There’s a number of new and exciting things coming, so keep an eye out on this blog ;-)
As a bonus, here’s a photo of the office while we work on the upcoming iPhone and iPad applications. More updates on that one are coming very soon too. We’re considering doing a few blogposts on the design and development decisions behind the app.
Yesterday we rolled out a new homepage for Goplan. The old one was pretty cool, but it didn’t necessarily reflect how our product looks like, or particularly appeal to our user base. So we built a new one from the ground up, based on the aesthetics that you were already used to from inside the application. We hope you like it! Screenshots of the old and new pages are included below.
The old homepage:
And the new homepage:
As with the product itself, we care about your thoughts and opinion, so if you have any feedback on the new homepage, do let us know! We already had a bunch of feedback on Twitter and did a few tweaks based on it. Thanks, guys.
And with that, we’ll get back to work on a bunch of really cool stuff we’re about to roll out. Keep an eye out on our blog!
While work continues on large things like the 
