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New Year, New Automations: What's New With Butler

Chris Kaundart

It’s a new year, and that means a “new you” wouldn’t mind some help to get everything done, right? We’re thinking about how we can assist you in reaching those productivity goals in 2021—that’s why we’re making more automation command types available to all Butler users, including free plans!

Trello’s automation arm, Butler, is here to help shave steps off your workflow and amplify your output. Here’s what is new and now available to all:

Scheduled And Due Date Commands
Email Notifications
HTTP Requests
Multiple Card And Board Buttons
New Butler Options Right From The Card Back

For more details, check out the Trello blog post.

What's your favorite automation? Share with us in the comments!

Comments

Soumyadeep Mandal - SaM

Hi @Chris Kaundart ,

Now that's some cool updates!

Thanks for the update information!

Regards,

Soumyadeep

Pramodh M

Hi @Chris Kaundart

So excited about the new features!

Thanks,
Pramodh

Chris Kaundart

Glad to hear about the excitement and hope each of you find new ways to make those workflows more efficient!

Travis Hamera

any plans to open up butler on the power-ups api? Would love to see that to improve our workflow.

Chris Kaundart

Hey @Travis Hamera, I'm not aware of anything related to Butler with the Power-Ups API, but I'll pass this along to the development team to consider.

Thanks for sharing your feedback!

Dominic P_

This is great, I'll definitely try out the HTTP requests in Butler to replace the need for web sockets.

Ryan Williams_kmuyi8

Glad to see the new features. Any chance to have an upgrade for Gold users to increase the Butler quotas?

Chris Kaundart

Hey @Ryan Williams, Trello Gold does offer additional Butler command quota! The free plan comes with 50 command runs per month and upgrading to Gold gets you 200 command runs per month.

Thanks for commenting—let me know if you have any other questions around Butler!

carrie_eandm

Where do I start?!

I was an early adopter of Butler before it became a built-in feature for all users. Its helped our automation for the last three years - most importantly with moving completed cards from our projects board to our archive board!

When I started using Butler, I was writing the command in a card title. Now has an amazing interface to make adding/setting up a command with just a click of a button! We have commands set for a variety of items on boards, between boards, to send reports, and I even use it to track my personal book library!

Here's a screenshot of a few that help with housekeeping on our tasks board:

Here's a few from my personal book library board:

@Brittany Joiner has a recent post about inactive card notifications that is interesting - I'm always learning new ways to incorporate Butler!

Ivan Lima

Well, mine is silly, but I'll share anyway. Maybe, I encourage others to share whatever they have. One of my Trello tics is keeping them the same standard. Cards with attachments display small clips underneath the title, cards with comments, a set of dashes, cards with checklists, the checkbox icon along with total/complete items, etc. What about cards with titles only? Well, Buttler takes care of that for me by adding a placeholder to give me the relief that all my cards are standardized in shape and size.

Screen Shot 2021-02-01 at 9.20.37 PM.png

Screen Shot 2021-02-01 at 9.22.30 PM.png

Don't you feel better when you get all your cards aligned, or it's just me?

Ollie Guan

My favorite automation is 'Creating reports with Butler'.

https://help.trello.com/article/1192-creating-reports-with-butler

屏幕截图_20210202103509.png

Iain Dooley

I wrote this article a while back, it's still one of my main automations:

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

Vongsawat

This is still by far my favourite automation, even though it doesn't do anything too crazy. I've got a bunch of these scattered all over my database.

Depending on the prefix, I can list out all the components I'll be using for a task, and it'll find and link it from a different Board, or create a new component card on that board.

Where the linkage is via the referencedBy checklist, instead of the unwieldy Trello Attachements. So that if I ever make any changes to the underlying component, I can immediately trace it back up to see what it affects.

Once it was up and running, having multiple API databases that all connected with each other with just a prefix felt pretty amazing.

Soumyadeep Mandal - SaM

Hey everyone,

This is a butler automation rule that I have made for a friend's Birthday party planning last week. I have modified the rule a little bit so that personal information can be hidden.

Screenshot 2021-02-02 210545.jpg

Regards,

Soumyadeep

Davin Studer

I've set up a board for house maintenance items that need to be completed on a regular basis. I just have two lists. The maintenance items and stuff that is due.

When an item comes due it is moved to the Maintenance Due list and an email is sent to me.

When I am done with the maintenance item I move it back to the first column and the due date it changed based on how the maintenance item is labeled. If it has the 6, 12, or 24 months label then the due date is incremented 6,12, or 24 months from today. If it has the yearly label then it is incremented to next year on the same day. Also, if the Early Spring or Early Winter labels are added to a card then the due date is set to a specific date (Mar 1, or Nov 1) for the current year. So, when I am done with the maintenance item I simply move it back to the House Maintenance Items list and it will reset the due date and remind me next time it comes due.

Hana Kučerová

My favorite automation? Just a really simple one. On one of my boards I'm creating tasks for myself. Sometimes I need help from others, but I'm participant of each card I've created. So the rule adds me as a member after the card is created by me.

Dan Ivory_4y9mok

Here are some Butler demo videos of my favourite automations, so far!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyJ6ZNQXPc4Vj7xHhcDxga9-WbHIWxtcS

Any questions, let me know

Dan

Brittany Joiner

I love the due dates one! I'm using that in my current "life dashboard". With Butler, I have a card that is created every day with a list of habits, and sets the due date to end of the day. But i would notice those cards would sometimes get cluttered up in my "doing" list if i forgot to drag them over at the end of the day, so I use the Due Dates automation to move them over to "done" as soon as the day is over! (I can see how many habits I accomplished by looking at the checklist preview on the card!

Chris Kaundart

@Davin Studer, love the use for home maintenance. I tend to forget some of these things, I may borrow this as inspiration!

Brant Schroeder

I like the buttons feature. Here is a simple example but it works great to reset one of the boards I use.

Pramodh M

Hi @Chris Kaundart

I'm new to Trello and here is my basic Automation rules defined

Thanks,
Pramodh

Pramodh M

FYI,

Jira Issue created from Trello

Issue Created from Trello.png

Daniel Ebers

I am new to Trello as well (especially to Butler) but it seems to work very easily - nice!

Maksims Busigins_qokv8z

great news!

Chris Kaundart

Thanks for sharing @Pramodh M—I like how you are able to bring the two different tools together with Butler!

Donnie Grooms

This Butler command keeps me current with my to-do list.

Butler Command.PNG

Pramodh M

Hi @Chris Kaundart

Glad you liked it. Thanks

When will I receive the badge?

Jimmy Seddon

Great post @Chris Kaundart!

I wrote an article last night: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/Trello-Gaming-amp-Charity-Oh-My-featuring-butler-automation/ba-p/1607311

That explains how I'm using scheduled automation of tasks weekly, a card button to update a given card when I'm finished and an automation rule to archive completed cards. All to manage social media posts for fundraising campaign.

Sergei Haller

great post

Eva Kasiak

I was sort of puzzled by the Trello in the past 🤔 There was even a time when I was wondering why the heck Atlassian bought it (other than to expand market share) 🔑. Jira was always the best thing to me. However last year I started one initiative called IT Coaching Hub around which I've managed to build an experimental team of four people to develop the concept.

Trello was our way to go. Why? Because of its simplicity, easy setup, and just right feeling when working within the tasks inside.

And even though we don't have fancy paid plans in place as IT Coaching Hub does not have any budget to operate with. Trello helped us to organize the work, plan the next steps, convert high-level vision into the practical board with statuses. And it keeps us aligned and transparent.

I've been exploring Butler and automation and I simply love it! This is exactly what's needed. As sometimes simple can become too simplistic and in the long run overcomplated - if you know what I mean

We use reports to send out emails about tasks in progress - so people know what's with them.
Have rules in place to add labels automatically and see better through the board.
We Archive the cards after a month - as it helps us to keep the board clean too.
When a new card is added it goes to the top of the backlog
when the attachment is added all other people are also added to the card
We automatically add a check sticker to the card when its due date is marked so we know visually and quickly what's needs to be reviewed/checked.

My favorite ones are the reports sent via email - as they help all of us to understand where we need to act now. Plus I find very useful the one with the stickers and all stickers idea! it makes the work more fun.🎉

IT Coaching Hub (1).png IT Coaching Hub (2).png

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