In the last 2 days we launched 2 new features (the new project status widgets and the generic post-commit hooks for developers), so we thought we’d go for 3 features, 3 days in a row. This one’s something we wanted and you wanted too. A company-wide calendar, listing calendar events, tasks and milestones happening in all the projects you care about in your company. The new calendar is stepping into the shoes of the very old (and quite outdated) company agenda, which basically listed the same thing, but in a way that was not as friendly.

This feature is now active on all user accounts, and can be accessed straight from the dashboard by clicking “Company calendar” in the sidebar (the old “Company agenda” link is now gone). Keep in mind you can’t add events through this calendar interface yet as it is read-only, but it’s in our plans for the future.

Hope you like all the new features and updates we’re rolling out. As always, your feedback is quite welcome. Reach us in the comments here or by email at [email protected]. Thank you!

This is a developer feature - if you manage your software development projects on Goplan, this post might interest you. Read on!

A couple of weeks we launched post-commit hook support for Github. We don’t discriminate based on version control systems or services you use, so today we’re launching generic post-commit hook support on Goplan. So if you want your source code commit messages to show up on your project’s activity feed, you can check the updated “Hooks” page inside each of your Goplan products for information on how to push messages to our system.

We’ve had several requests for generic git and subversion support, so here it is! We hope that these features help you keep track of everything related to your projects right from inside Goplan. Let us know if you have any feedback on this feature or our product as a whole.

We’re big fans of Github. We use it to host our source code (both open as well as closed), and have individually been users since the very early days of the service. It makes us quite happy to launch post-commit hook URLs for Goplan projects.

So if you create software and host your source code on Github too, you can go to any of your projects on Goplan and use the new “Hooks” menu to grab the URL to use on Github as a post-commit hook. This makes your source code commits show up in your Goplan activity, linking directly to the commit on Github. Exciting! Let us know in the comments how you feel about the change and if you are looking for something else. Happy post-commit hooking!

Note: The Agendacat picture above is from the Octodex and was created by firstdegree.

We just launched our brand new infrastructure (codename Bender - after the Futurama character). This means that if you access Goplan now, you’re accessing your data through new, faster and more reliable servers. This post, which may be a bit on the techy side, outlines how Bender works and what you can expect from the upgrade.

We’ve been on Amazon‘s servers since they launched their cloud computing solutions years ago (Did you know Goplan was actually the first publicly accessible application running on Amazon EC2? We were profiled on Wired Magazine about it back then too). It allows us to grow our infrastructure easily with usage and to maintain great performance. Despite being on a great datacenter, however, our server configuration was running a bit stale and our machines were not on their tip-top performance - even though Goplan has always been snappy for most our users.

So, we decided to start fresh, with a brand new infrastructure configuration, on brand new servers. Bender is basically a combination of new servers and new software running on those servers. Although this means there’s no actual new features on Goplan based on this announcement, you can expect more reliability, speed and security. Bender lets us scale faster than before, and recover from any mishaps faster too (luckily we didn’t have many of those in our history, but we want to be safe). One thing that we also expect to improve is our email delivery - we’ve made a few changes to make sure no email from Goplan is marked as spam by automated filters, so if you had issues with emails from us being marked as junk, that should be fixed.

If during the next few days you experience any issues accessing Goplan or doing things you expected to be able to do, please let our team know by contacting us at [email protected]. Thank you!

We’re really happy to announce that a feature many of you have been waiting for has now been implemented and rolled out to our production servers. You can now create new projects based on former projects by copying milestones, tasks and tags (you can select which of these to copy on project creation).

To access this functionality, go to your Projects list and click “Create project” - you can then access templating options by clicking “Show template options”. Select the assets you want to copy from your old project to the new one and you’re good to go.

A note on copying milestones and due dates: When copying milestones we shift the milestones due dates relative to the project creation date. This works great in most of the cases, but you may need to adjust these manually after the new project is created to make sure they fit your needs.

Feedback welcome: as with everything we do, your feedback is important to us. Try the feature out and email us any feedback you may have (our team is always available at [email protected]). Thanks!

Update: this deal is now over - thanks to everyone who signed-up! We’re definitely running more deals like this one in the future, so keep an eye on our twitter feed and this blog!

Managing projects doesn’t have to suck. It also doesn’t have to blow a hole in your wallet.

So between Black Friday (November 26) and Cyber Monday (November 29), we’re slashing the price on our Unlimited plan down to $35/month. If you compare that to the competition - Basecamp comes to mind -, with Goplan you get a great UI, more features and great support, all for a killer price.

This price is valid for as long as you remain a customer. You’ll be able to use Goplan without any limits on users, projects and storage, for $35 dollars a month - forever. Goplan has been around since 2005, and we’ve been making people happy since. Hope you like the offer, and as with everything we do, we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Happy thanksgiving!

Read more and sign-up by clicking here.

PS: If you’re in a modern browser (Firefox, Chrome or Safari), check out the html5 canvas goodness in our globe! Developers: want to see how we built the snowglobe using canvas and device orientation sensing? See this blog post over at our Webreakstuff blog.

As some of you know, with the recent update to our new Teams and Permissions functionality, we had to do a few updates to our Free plan (namely, reducing the number of users and projects it allows you to have). This came as a bit of a surprise to a few of our users, one of which emailed us. The email we sent is below. We are posting it here (edited slightly for brevity) in hopes of hearing your feedback on this change.

I understand your frustration. Changing our Free plan (particularly for users who were already on it) has been a tough decision. Alas, also one we had to do. Maintaining an open service for many (many) thousands of free users is tough, and it takes a toll on everything we do. Support email is filled with requests from free users and more servers are necessary to run the application.

We love having the ability to give people our product for free - I’m sure we help many people who wouldn’t be able to pay for our paid plans in managing their personal projects. We do it with pride. We do, however, run it at a cost we pay for ourselves, and there’s only so much that our bank accounts can stretch to support free users.

In order to keep accommodating people on the free plan, we had to change its limits. There were people managing big money making companies (even household names) with our free account as its limits were quite permissive. That is an unsustainable situation for us. So what we did was level our free offering with the rest of the competition, and hope the product speaks for itself.

We feel like we have the number one product out there for online project management and collaboration. We also have the most competitive pricing. In short, what I’m saying is that we believe that if you go beyond 1 project and 2 users, you’re probably good for our startup plan, which we believe is pretty good.

I hope this helps explain our reasoning.

At the end of the day, we’re honored that people choose our product over the competition. It makes us proud, and makes our team come back to do this every day. We’re sad about having to limit our Free plan a bit, but our business so demands. Our goal is the same: to provide the best service out there, and to keep improving our product. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Hey everyone! In order to do the big migration to the new teams and permissions functionality, Goplan will be down for a few hours tomorrow in order to make sure everything migrates safely. We apologize for the inconvenience these hours of downtime may bring, but rest assured it is for a good cause. You’ll be able to follow our process through this blog and our twitter account.

As always, feel free to comment, tweet or email any questions you may have on the new functionality and the migration we’re doing. See you after the big move! We are super excited and hope you are too!

Upgrade status report:

Saturday, 4:40 pm GMT: Update time! In about 20 minutes, we’re bringing down the servers, backing up everything, upgrading functionality, and bringing it back.

Saturday, 5:42 pm GMT: We’re running the final batch of integrity checks to be sure that the migration runs smoothly. Once we’re done, we start the process.

Saturday, 6:11 pm GMT: Here we go. We just brought the servers down and are now backing up the database in order to start the migration.

Saturday, 6:27 pm GMT: Migration has just started. We expect the whole process to take just over one hour. We’ll report back once it’s over!

Saturday, 7:41 pm GMT: The migration has ended successfully, and we’re making sure everything’s good to go. We’ll keep you posted.

Saturday, 8:19 pm GMT: Looks like we’re almost good to go. We need a bit of time to double check and make a second backup post-migration.

Saturday, 8:56 pm GMT: We’re done! You should now be able to see the new teams/permissions functionality in your accounts. Let us know if you run into any issues!