Q about Rules and Templates

Question

I'm designing a Trello workflow for a client to manage the creation and publishing of an anthology book. The workflow involves two boards (one for the book-level tasks and another for the author-level tasks which run in parallel) and lots of advanced Butler rules. I link author-specific cards between the two boards but I've also specified the board name in some of the rules.

My plan is to define board templates with rules and replicate them for each new anthology project (and there will be multiple simultaneous book projects.) I'm starting to suspect this isn't going to be as smooth as I'd hoped!

Are the rules going to replicate with the board templates?

Have there been any updates to the Command Libraries since Aug 2021 when this article was written? ( https://help.trello.com/article/1139-command-libraries)

Is there a way to link Boards together (with Trello Premium) and avoid using specific board references in rules? Maybe this defaults when cards on the boards are linked?

Thx! Karen

milynnus · Answer

@Karen Cleveland

Based on what you have described,  Trello automation should be able to handle it. As far as triggering across boards it will depend on board design - for example you can trigger when a checklist is completed on one board to move a linked card in another board since they are linked. So it depends a lot on design. There are different techniques eg liked structured naming convention.

Karen Cleveland · Answer

Thanks @milynnus

My automations are quite specific within a Board:

When THIS Checklist in THIS list is completed, add ANOTHER Checklist to the Card, and move the Card to THAT LIst. I'm setting up and testing the Board individually and haven't started testing multiple boards simultaneously. Maybe there won't be any problems with rules getting triggered in Board A by changes in Board B - but I'm looking for any "gotchas" before they get me!

milynnus · Answer

@Karen Cleveland

I think the fundamental design/constraint is that command is created and owned by the author. They can be shared within the workspace and in some cases the member need to activate them. So it depends on the author to set the sharing and or enabling parameters for the command.

In the case of a UK Dr client who wanted to publish the equivalent of a book, he had two parent cards from which copies of them are created as chapters and topics each containing checklists to be checked off by the user. The input is an spreadsheet of chapters and topics. His objective was to be able to add, delete, rename and reorder the items across the ~1200 cards automatically. So he has one board for each book. Trello automation is primarily used to trigger a bot that will process the change automatically - each taking 20-30 minutes to go through the entire board. Because of the number of updates, a paid plan was required and this was his primary concern.