Customizing Trello

[Charisma Riley]

I am looking for an open source or free extension (or other solution) that would allow me to select and move multiple cards at once. This is super frustrating, especially when I have lots of them to move simultaneously. The only option I've seen so far is a paid solution, and honestly, that's upsetting.

@Iain Dooley : Would Trellintaor be able to help with this kind of functionality? I want to get into the nitty-gritty that is Trello, and start to solve all sorts of problems like this on my own. I was really impressed by your post about Trellinator, and the possibilities that lie outside of paid solutions—especially in the world of independent contractors and freelancers, where power-ups remain forever out of reach financially. Is there a way to reach you outside of this community, btw?

Some of the first things I would like to figure out how to do:

1) Add checklists only from completed or non-completed cards;

2) Use unlimited/custom colors for cards;

3) Move multiple cards at once.

(Too bad you don't develop solutions for Confluence Cloud; that is a nightmare I would really appreciate help on customizing. They've deprecated or removed almost everything that allows any kind of personality or native dynamic interactions—even between their own products. It's depressing.)

[Iain Dooley]

@Charisma Riley thanks for checking out Trellinator! Yes Trello is an amazing and powerful platform for business automation, but there are limits to what we can do with the API. I'll respond to each of your items individually:

1) Add checklists only from completed or non-completed cards;

In general, adding checklists automatically is one of the strong points of the API. I'm not sure what you mean by "completed or non-completed cards" though, can you elaborate?

2) Use unlimited/custom colors for cards;

This is something no API or power up can do unfortunately. Power ups can add new interface elements like buttons and the like but can't edit existing interface elements like the CSS of lists, cards, etc.

3) Move multiple cards at once.

This is actually achievable pretty well without the API: just create a temporary list, put all your cards in it, then move the list. That's one solution. You can also "move all cards in this list" using the 3 little dots at the top right of the list.

There may be other use cases for moving multiple cards that would benefit from API automation, though -- can you describe your specific use case in more detail? Thanks again!

[Iain Dooley]

@Charisma Riley BTW you can find a link to my website in my profile :)

[Charisma Riley]

Nice, thank you. I will look you up there. :D

As for your questions, let me see if I can answer them sufficiently:

1) I mean that I want to be able to limit which cards I'm able to see checklists for (i.e. "completed" cards or cards that are not completed); though now I am wondering if I can do this with filters.

2) As for unlimited/custom colors, there must—even if it's just a Tampermonkey script or a Chrome extension. This guy on the Trello colors request thread tried to give me a browser script, but it did not work for some reason (check out this thread, btw, it's pretty interesting). And the Atlassian developers claim that literally anything can be customized in Trello using Power-Ups. His TamperMonkey script reads:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Trello Unlimited Label Colours
// @version 0.4
// @description Applies hex codes embedded in trello labels to the label itself.
// @include *//trello.com/*
// @grant none
// @run-at document-idle
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
var o,re,t,m;
function applyColours() { window.jQuery(".card-label[title*='[#']").each(function() { o = window.jQuery(this); re = new RegExp("^(.*?)\\s\\[(#[0-9A-Fa-f]{3,6})\\]"); t = o.attr("title"); m = re.exec(t); o.css("backgroundColor",m[2]).text(m[1]); }); }
window.setTimeout(function() {
window.jQuery(".list-card").on("click",applyColours);
applyColours();
},1000);
})();

I know that even if this worked, it would only work for me and not the rest of my team; but I would just get them all to use it. :D

3) I will make 2-3 cards that go with a particular category in a list, but no matter what, new cards are created at the bottom of a list. And instead of being able to grab all of them and pull them up to the category they belong to,  I have to do it one-by-one. This is annoying. Does that make sense? :D

Thank you for reading my thread!

[Iain Dooley]

@Charisma Riley Yep you can get infinite colours by using a Chrome extension or whatever. And yes if I were to do this I'd just put the RGB code into the label name and transform it on the frontend. But it would only work on web, and only in Chrome, and therefore would be kind of useless right? And it would load after the page loads, and be super clunky. But you definitely can't edit Trello's existing HTML/CSS with a power up.

To your other points:

"limit which cards I'm able to see checklists for"

do you mean when you're copying checklists from an existing card, into a new card, and you see every single card that has ever had a checklist in the menu? Just prepend the name of your checklist templates card with a "." so it appears at the top of the list :)

"instead of being able to grab all of them and pull them up to the category they belong to,  I have to do it one-by-one. This is annoying. Does that make sense? :D"

Hmm, well if you have a bunch of cards that you want to move into another list, then keyboard shortcuts are a quick way to do it:

https://trello.com/shortcuts

For example, you could:

1) Move the list you want to move cards out of next to the list you want to move cards into

2) Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly move cards across

3) Move the list back

However, using the API you could, for example, have a command that would move a card to to the top of a list in the same board when you add a label that is the same as a list name.

This would be useful for sorting lots of cards into lots of different lists and making sure they went to the top of the list so you could easily find them right away.

[Charisma Riley]

I used the "list and move" metod you described and it was definitely easier than what I had been doing in the past. I have a lot of tasks that require the same type of information, and many can come to my desk at the same time. I wish I could find something much simpler in the freemium range, more along the lines of Multiselect for Trello . Any thoughts?

[Iain Dooley]

@Charisma Riley Hmm it's hard to make a recommendation without more specific information, but Multiselect looks pretty good. What doesn't it do that you wish it would do?

[Charisma Riley]

@Iain Dooley I'm sure it works exactly as I need it to; I just would like to make something like it myself. It is too expensive for something that should already be a native feature. Surely *many* people need to bulk move cards. . . they are created at the bottom of a list. If you make several at a time, especially if you create from a CSV file, all of them will need to get moved at one time. We can make cards in bulk; we cannot move then in bulk. To have one feature natively, while the other doesn't exist, is kind of odd. So, I would love help creating something that would work similarly. Plus, I want to learn Trello dev better, and I think this would be an awesome project to start with! Can I make something like this? How would I begin? (Many Trello extensions you can download from the Web Store and see how they tick; this is not one of them since it's a paid product.) I'm sure you do not have time to help me out with something like this, so please do not feel like I'm only looking to you to help me. I really simply liked Trellinator and wanted to know the gist of what types of scripts I can make with it; I thought it might be a route to achieve my goal. I'm guessing not, though, so I'll need to find another way to begin. :D

[Iain Dooley]

@Charisma Riley cool so Trellinator works entirely "behind the scenes". It's not a power up and it's not a Chrome extension, so you can't add a checkbox to the cards, for example.

What you can do with Trellinator is, for example, move a card based on label name. If you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, the process of moving through a list of cards and applying labels based on category is actually pretty quick.

Trellinator could then move a card to the list with the same name as the label.

If you're doing a Chrome extension, that's a different kettle of fish ... 

Trellinator works entirely with Trello's existing interface elements (and as a result works on any device) whereas Chrome extensions and power ups have more modification power over Trello's interface, but the limitation that (for the most part) they won't work on mobile devices.