Variables in checklist items

Andor Admiraal

Just upgraded my Trello account to be able to use Butler, but it looks like the workflow we had planned - defining projects as a series of milestones and tasks - won't work with Trello. 

Our idea was to use create milestones in our project planning as cards, and then add the tasks required to fulfill the milestones in checklists on the card. When moving cards to To Do, they would automatically create the corresponding tasks on the different boards of the different teams.

However, after banging my head against the wall for hours, I came to the conclusion that checklists can't really be automated. They don't take variables such as the board name (project name, in our case), card name (miletstones) and - completely maddning  - when converting checklists into cards you can automate renaming the remaining checklist items, but there's nothing at all you can do with the cards! Which means that we still need to create all tasks manually, manually entering project names and milestone descriptions on each card. 

While it would be nice if checklist items could use variables or could be renamed using Butler, it seems like it's just not possible. 

Does anybody have a good advice for what would be a good workflow would be, using milestones comprised of multiple tasks?

Iain Dooley

@Andor Admiraal so do you mean that you're creating linked cards from checklist items similar to how I've described it in this article:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/Trello-Subtasks-with-Butler/ba-p/1060392

But you want to be able to move those cards to different boards and/or be assigned to different people and so on?

One thing to note in terms of automating changes to cards once they're created is that one Butler action can trigger another. So you can have your first command to convert the checklist into linked items, then you have another command that triggers when cards are created.

The "hack" bit here is that in order to, for example, move a card to a particular list/board when created in order to maybe assign it to a particular team, you would need to put something in the checklist item name, for example you could have a checklist item:

Export the Figma files to sliced JPG #Design

then you can use a command that triggers when a card is created matching pattern:

{*} #{*}

and the variable {wildcard2} will contain the team name. Using this basic command pattern you should be able to achieve everything you described above.