Kanban Plugin

[mgmeyers]

Create markdown-backed Kanban boards in Obsidian

• Bugs, Issues, & Feature Requests

• Development Roadmap

How do I

• Add a date to a card

• Add a time to a card

• Add an image to a card

• Create a Kanban board

• Create notes from cards

• Install the plugin

• Search a Kanban board

• View a Kanban’s archive

Settings

• Add date and time to archived cards

• Archive date time format

• Archive date time separator

• Board header buttons

• Date display format

• Date format

• Date trigger

• Display card checkbox

• Hide card display dates

• Hide card display tags

• Hide dates in card titles

• Hide tags in card titles

• Lane width

• Link dates to daily notes

• Linked page metadata

• Local vs. global settings

• Maximum number of archived cards

• New line trigger

• Note folder

• Note template

• Prepend append new cards

• Show relative date

• Time format

• Time trigger

FAQs

• Frontmatter limitations & gotchas

• Themes with enhanced Kanban support

Support

If you find this plugin useful and would like to support its development, you can sponsor me on Github, or buy me a coffee.

[davecan]

Are you able to render a kanban view of a set of existing notes with one note per card, rather than generating tasks from created cards?

[mgmeyers]

Not yet, but this functionality is definitely on my radar

[Spidrax]

This is very polished, both visually and functionally. It’s already useful, and I’m excited to see how this plugin progresses. Thanks for sharing!

[tf2]

I’ve been looking for something like this, and can’t wait to try it out.

I have two use-cases, and would love to see either or both of them possible with this plugin (eventually):

1. Task management

I think you’re already heading in the direction that makes the most sense to me: a board is made up of a single note, with headings designating columns, and list items designating cards.

Features I’d like:

• tags

• filtering by tags

• formatting by tags (eg, a particular tag gives it a green border, or blue text, or a particular icon/emoji etc.)

• sorting by tags, which would also allow sorting by priority

• notes for list items/tasks — one way to handle this could be the way TaskPaper format does: a line indented immediately below a list item, but with no - preceding it, is a note attached to the previous item/task (actually, I’d like to be able to use Taskpaper style checklists, as opposed to GitHub style, but that ship may have sailed in Obsidian)

• checkbox items within a task — eg, subtasks, where “- [ ] Go to store” is a task/card, but “- milk” or “- [ ] milk” indented under it is a checklist item on the card

2. Project management

In this Kanban-like scenario, I use one card per project. The columns and rows allow me to see at a glance what I’m working on, what’s next, what’s on hold, etc. — a kind of personal dashboard.

Here, I’d need the project name (card title), a description line / note. And ways to reflect other parameters — due dates, broader categories, tags, collaborators, etc. Maybe not all would always be displayed all the time — click to expand, for example. Formatting options like for tags above. It might be easiest here to have an option where each card is a single note, or where notes are divided into cards YAML-style (with three dashes)

For both of these approaches, YAML front-matter might be one way of handling some of the features.

Also for both, it might be useful to look at Focalboard. I really like the way you can have arbitrary parameters, and can turn many kinds of parameters into columns, or sort and filter criteria. (I don’t like that it uses a database on the back end — I’d prefer a file of text notes or even yaml. If I could get a plain-text Focalboard, I’d be thrilled.)

Anyway — just ideas — you asked!

[davecan]

Here’s some more random thoughts…

Similar to @tf2 I’d be very interested in similar task/project functionality. However, I use an “action” note to represent something that needs to be done in my system, and it can have tasks within it.

So the flow is:

• [meeting or project] note generates ⮕
  • 1…N [action] notes which each can contain ⮕
    • 1…N - [ ] task entries

I’d like to be able to slice and dice the kanban view, perhaps using tabs, as follows:

• show projects by swim lane status, and move them to other status lanes
• show actions by swim lane status, and move them to other status lanes
• show actions by project swim lane, and allow reordering (vertical prioritization) and movement between swim lanes
  • this would aggregate up by tag/whatever, so a swim lane for #project/foo would contain all action notes that contain that tag
• show individual tasks by action/project swim lane, in the order listed in the note(s)

[tf2]

imdone is a great example of an app that manages tasks embedded within other plain text documents. It’s very clever and actively developed, and not just for code. I don’t really work that way, but might be worth looking at, both for ideas and maybe to use.

[davecan]

Yes that’s very similar to what I was thinking. I’ve tried it before but ultimately chose not to use it.

[mgmeyers]

obsidian-kanban 0.0.7 has been released!

0.0.7 · Discussion #23 · mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

• Adds markdown support to cards

• Adds link / tag autocomplete

[Neu]

Hey, loving the plugin.

I have a bug and a question, and a suggestion.

---

Bug:

This happens whenever I click on a [[note]] link, the to the obsidian note opens, but so does the pop up, all of the time.

---

Question:

With the Delete / Archive functionality, where do the Archived things go? I tried to search the forum if obsidian has some default archive or something, but I’m clueless.

---

Suggestions:

1. Ctrl + Hover over the link previews the page, same way the calendar plugin does it.
2. Check out https://nullboard.io/preview , hover over the note and press [r], I think it’s cool that it turns it into a “raw” note, that you can use to add “sub-headers” to lists within the main boards.

Thanks again for the plugin.

[Cajun]

I like it, thank you for this plug-in.

[mgmeyers]

• 0.0.10 · Discussion #30 · mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban · GitHub
  • Adds IME support ()
  • Prevents cards from flickering when dragging & dropping
  • Prevents suggest box from remaining open when it shouldn’t
  • Adds better handling for external links ()
  • Force cards to scroll horizontally for long words

[mgmeyers]

• 0.0.11 · Discussion #32 · mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban · GitHub
  • Refactor menu system
  • Add “New note from card” menu option. This will create a new note with the card’s contents and link the note to the card.

[morlock]

Thanks so much for this plugin. I’ve found it immensely more useful than any of the other Kanban implementations so far. It was very simple to get integrated with my current project/TODO setup.

I think the only thing I’d miss at this point was a preview/hover over links

[mgmeyers]

• Release 0.0.12 · mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban · GitHub
  • Use “Default location for new notes”
  • Enable page preview for internal links

[mgmeyers]

Page preview has been added!

[morlock]

That’s some great service, right there. Task lists (which are what I’m trying to link to within their respective projects) work as expected.
Thank you so much!

[Cajun]

This is great to know. I’m finding multiple uses for the Kanban Plugin.

[JoeyAnthony]

Amazing plugin. Thanks so much for creating it. I’ve already been able to integrate it into my workflow with a small project tracker I’ve created as a test. I can add links to my notes and even links to tasks in the Things app. It seems to work great.

[Alex0]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS!
Great plugin!