We’re excited to announce the release of Kanban for WordPress, a free plugin that gives you a kanban board on your WordPress site.

I build a lot of websites on WordPress, some for clients, some for myself. For a couple years now, I’ve maintained a to-do list on each site, as a lot of developers do, as a simple way to manage projects. But to-do lists are limited, and collaboration is difficult.

After researching different kinds of agile project management, I tried a kanban board and found it quick to get started and easy for collaborating with my clients. But no kanban board plugin existed for WordPress!

I tried other kanban web apps but found they were clunky, had too few or too many features, or just plain didn’t work. And they all seemed to cost a lot per user.

So Kanban for WordPress was designed to be added seamlessly and transparently to any WordPress website to manage that site as a single project. However, you can also create a new WordPress install, like kanban.domain.com, and do your management from there.

Features

Kanban for WordPress is based on common kanban patterns and practices.

There are columns, or swimlanes, that represent the status of tasks. You create tasks, and optionally add them to a project. Then as you work on the project, you move tasks from “to do” to “doing” to “done” (or “backlog,” “in progress,” and “QA” or “Release” in more agile terms).

Along the way, you can assign the task to yourself or to other people on your team. If different team members are in charge of a certain status, QA for example, you can assign tasks to that team member.

You can also estimate how long you think a task will take and then track your progress. Each task includes a progress bar, so at a glance you can tell how far off you were.

We built Kanban for WordPress to let you get back to work. One of my biggest complaints with other kanban boards is how many clicks it takes to add tasks, add projects, assign tasks, set estimates, and everything else you need.

We also built Kanban for WordPress to be secure. One of the huge advantages of the board being on your own site, aside from convenience, is that you own your data. It’s sitting in your own database, available only to whomever you’ve given access to.

You also manage access to the board. We’ll be adding more roles and access control in the future, but for now user management is a simple settings screen. Users either have access or they don’t. All data is hidden from the front end.

Finally, we built Kanban for WordPress to be transparent. We built it so that it doesn’t clutter your site with extra pages, and most of the data is self-contained to the board.

Plans for the future

First, we’re excited to start collecting customer feedback. We’ve added support right in the plugin, to make collecting feedback faster and easier.

Also, like most WordPress plugins these days, we plan to offer add-ons—some paid, some free. The most requests so far are for more advanced user management, reports, and notifications. Users want to manage what clients can see and interact with, and to better track progress. We’re also considering sub-tasks, comments, and multiple boards.

Users have also requested integrations with repos like Bitbucket and Github, project management apps like Jira and Trello, communication channels like Slack and Hipchat, and time tracking tools like Toggl and Harvest. We plan to build these out as demand dictates.
Everyone struggles with project management, and we do, too. We hope Kanban for WordPress will help make people’s work easier. Please download the plugin for free from https://wordpress.org/plugins/kanban, and let us know what you think!