The plugin had huge potential to turn obsidian into full blown project management suite like ‘Jira offline’ with direct acces to local folders which is huge advantage. Sadly it lacks few important features for now.
The plugin have simple table view with custom properties that can be assigned for taksks it has customizable kanban board, calendar, and gallery view.
My wishlist for now is.
Gantt chart (as new type of panel)
Subtasks (with indentation in table)
Better portfolio management (some kind of main view to display all the projects created so far)
Resource planing sheet (every task requires some resources to be allocated)
Improved properties assignment
More accessible project templates (for now you can make a duplicate of project but it refers to the same folder so you need to duplicate this folder too)
Making the experience closer to what MSProjects offers but inside obsidian would be excellent.
I believe that every Project Manager that uses Obsidian in their day to day workflow would appreciate further development.
Original creator mentioned on GitHub that he is eager to facilitate it too.
Being aware that the implementation and maintenance of all these features is not a straightforward undertaking, to anyone who is gonna rise interest in this matter I am most grateful in advance.
Honestly Obsidian NOT having a project manager like this built in is a serious oversight. It’s great that we have bi-directional linking but no way to actually organize our notes/projects?
Unfortunately everyone seems to be obsessed with providing unsustainable free community solutions (or charging $300 for their plugins instead of $3) and the obsidian team prefer to rake money in from subscriptions instead of from actually building out core obsidian.
I disagree, Obsidian is intentionally minimal at its core. Having a built in project manager like Jira is against its philosophy. It is up to community to built such things through plugins. Personally, I would not appreciate it having such a feature.
Agreed. And broadly/generally useful to a huge range of people.
If a project manager was built in, it would probably have to be quite generic. Whereas some of the best tools are very specific and opinionated. And then it’s up to us to find/choose the best for our own needs.
Except when those tools are unmaintained and broken half the time it entirely defeats the purpose and renders that argument rather moot.
Obsidian doesn’t really have any reasonable way to actually organize or browse your notes other than a gimmicky graph plugin that brings in new users but is of virtually no practical utility to anyone who actually has to navigate their notes on a regular basis.
Obsidian’s plugin architecture is one of its greatest assets - plugins like Projects transform the app’s capabilities.
Obsidian’s plugin architecture is one of its liabilities - when a plugin like Projects is no longer developed after users have built systems around it, trust in the app’s reliability is degraded.
The developers may need something like an app store that helps developers of plugins get a consistent reward for their efforts. Otherwise Obsidian’s Community plugins will be a catalogue of abandoned and/or half-arsed efforts, and that will reflect poorly on Obsidian itself. That would be regrettable, because core Obsidian is a work of software brilliance.
I was thinking about myself quite a while, tried Todoist, Asana, OpenProject, Jira, etc.
I love the idea of markdown notes and stuff, but more and more I come to a conclusion that each process/action needs a specific tool and universal tools are usually less capable/comfortable to use then specialised one. That is a philosophical question.
To be closer to practical things, I’ve chosen Todoist for personal “actionables”, while using Obsidian notes (with project or task tag) to keep track of long-running things.
But I do like the idea of syncing data from those tools (e.g. Todoist) into Obsidian for history and knowledge-base purposes.
I was using Projects plugin myself (still do), but rarely, as it is not very comfortable to use on mobile.
As an idea for myself I also was thinking about custom Obsidian notes indexer that will allow to extract information and build custom dashboards outside of Obsidian, not to depend on it’s API and not to be limited with it’s UI.
Hi, all. I’m new to the forum, but a long time lurker and user of Obsidian
I agree that Obsidian Projects is a useful plugin; have used it a time or two for personal projects.
I’ve reached out to Marcus with an inquiry on possibly transferring the project and how he would like to proceed with a community-driven revival. I’m pretty busy with some other open-source stuff at the moment, plus my personal site & school, but I expect my schedule to open up in the next couple of weeks.
If I can get the ball rolling on this, I’ll make a plug-in PR for it and link the repo here. More details to come!
Portfolio management: create portfolios, add projects to portfolios.
Projects: create projects from an example template. Each project can be stored anywhere in the vault as a markdown file. It uses front matter to flag itself as a project file.
Timeline: a separate view appearing as a scrollable “Gantt” with grouped tasks, bars, dependencies (SF, SS, FS, FF), milestones. The timeline can be configured using various icons in the view, including date range, zoom, show/hide, etc.
Progress: a separate view showing progress bars per portfolio/project. Status on track, off track also.
Tasks: a separate view showing tasks grouped per week. Including assignees etc
Resources: a separate view showing tasks grouped per assignee.
Keeping most of these as separate views, allows to get more insight into the portfolio management, and allows working on multiple portfolios, projects within Obsidian.
I still haven’t decided whether to upgrade tasks to Obsidian tasks. Both should be possible, but for the time being, its easier to work with the projects in the table format that is currently in the project markdown files.
You will soon see all of this when I have it ready for initial testing
Hi,
Not yet.
Its getting some feedback from some select users at the moment, and making some refinements based on that.
Should be released soon through BRAT.
Oh… This plugin has kinda different goals, I see. It’s a tool with a more ‘serious’ mood for more ‘serious’ tasks, like managing a team, tracking tasks, etc.
The original plugin had the Galery view, so it could be used, say, for managing the base of video games, movies, etc. This plugin lacks of it.
Also, it won’t install via BRAT. I created a bug report on your github.
You’re right: the purpose of this plugin is for structured project management, mostly used by a project manager managing one or more projects with traditional PM tools.
Obsidian is great already for agile projects: tasks, kanban, notes, bases. Therefore, no need to add those features or try to replace them.
In developing this plugin, my goal was to think traditionally, how do tools such as MSProject or JIRA handle larger scale projects, with teams, milestones, stages etc.
It’s my first plugin, so I’m still shaky around using BRAT, and the verification requirements of submitting plugins as community plugins. I will definitely sort those out in the near future.
I would really appreciate feedback on its usability, and any new features that would make it even better.
Hi, all. I’m new to the forum, but a long time lurker and user of Obsidian