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

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

January 14, 2021

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!

64 comments

Hi @Chris Kaundart ,

Now that's some cool updates!

Thanks for the update information!

Regards,

Soumyadeep

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Hi @Chris Kaundart

So excited about the new features!

Thanks,
Pramodh

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

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

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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!

Like • Pedro Silva likes this

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

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

Like • Pedro Silva likes this

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!

Like • Pedro Silva likes this

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!

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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?

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My favorite automation is 'Creating reports with Butler'.

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

屏幕截图_20210202103509.png

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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

Like • Chris Kaundart likes this

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.

Like • Chris Kaundart likes this

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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!