Using boards as templates - Members not copied

Question

We use Trello for managing the process of bringing new products to market. We have created a "template" board for new products, which has several cards for the tasks that need to be completed by various team members. The individual cards all have specific relevant mambers attached, but when we "Copy" the template board to create a new product, all the relationships between cards and individual members are lost.

We have a workaround, by copying LISTS rather than whole boards, but this is much more cumbersome than it should be.

Is there no way of hard-wiring the EXACT set-up of a board as a template that can be used to create a new board?

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Neale Hollingsworth You can see an example of using a "board of boards" approach with a template board copied every time a new card is created here:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/5b4f7cbd3e3c4bfe7ad94a5e7abdb7cc

This is the example in my "Introducing Trellinator" article with setup instructions:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

The only thing is that, since the copied board begins its life without the members, they won't already be added as per the template board.

The way to fix this is to add a label to each card in your template board with the username to be assigned in the created board.

The above code example would need this modified version of the createNewProjectBoard function in order to enable this "add member based on label" functionality:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/c9ddd1f85de636ffe758a2245b6ddedb

Katrin Anger · Answer

@Neale Hollingsworth

Hi Neale,

It's a standard behavior by Trello to not copy board members over when a board is copied. I think, this is out of security reasons.

I am brainstorming a solution with Butler for Trello to create a workflow for that, but Butler is currently not accessible for new users, so I don't know if that would help you at all. (?)