As many of you may know - The Changelog Weekly — our free weekly email covering everything that hits our open source radar — was on hiatus this summer. After personally hand-crafting and shipping 29 consecutive issues, Adam burnt out. There was just no way that he could keep up that pace.
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After months of silence and a constant stream of people asking what happened to Weekly, we got to thinking. Adam was the bottleneck. His process (manually writing ERB templates in Middleman) did not scale well. Perfecta 76 uc manual. We needed to collaborate, but we lacked a collaboration tool. So we turned Trello into a Content Management System (CMS) for the newsletter. It saved Weekly.
I want to be clear: we are not using Trello to manage production of the newsletter. We are using it to manage the content of the newsletter. If Weekly were a blog, Trello would be our WordPress. If Weekly were an online store, Trello would be our Shopify.
Why we do it
We think Trello makes a great CMS for this kind of content. It works so well, in fact, that it almost feels like we’re cheating. Here are some of the biggest wins:
Instant collaboration
To reduce the 'bus factor,' we needed more than one person curating the content. Multi-user systems can be surprisingly complex to build. Thankfully, the Trello team has put a lot of thought and effort in to that complexity so we don’t have to!
We simply add Trello users to the board and they are instant collaborators. Permissions? Handled. Password reset? Done. Avatars, multiple email addresses (awesome feature, btw), notification settings? All of these features are there for us to use.
We can even discuss the content via the built-in commenting system!
Post from anywhere
Adam and I have different editing techniques. His philosophy is Always Be Collecting. Throughout the week, whenever he finds interesting content he emails it to Trello. At the end of the week, he goes through his findings, organizes everything, and includes the best stuff in the newsletter. It’s a mark-and-sweep approach, if you will. Prior to Trello, he was emailing himself (I know, right?) and triaging a label in Gmail at the end of the week. It was all stuck in his inbox (doesn't scale).
I’m more of a completionist. When I find something to post, I want to categorize it, write about it, format it, and be done with it. Rinse and repeat.
Trello is flexible enough to handle both styles. Adam uses Trello’s Create cards by email feature instead of emailing himself. These emailed-in cards go to a board called “Radar”. This way our board for the current issue of Weekly stays nice and clean. Trello lets you easily transfer cards between boards, so at the end of the week he goes through Radar and moves the best cards over to the board for the current issue of Weekly, edits, and ships.
Bonus: since Radar is also a shared board, I can look through all of the content Adam has collected for inspiration for what I'd like to include in Weekly as well as the blog or Twitter.
Trello’s mobile apps suit my completionist style quite well.
When I find content on the go, I can place it in our Weekly board, write it up, and be done with it.
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Organize with ease
Content curation is just one part of creating something people love. You also have to present that content in an organized, easily digestible fashion.
With many CMS’s, this is where we’re often left to copy/paste our content in one big text field. With Trello, we can:
- Drag and drop stories to quickly reorder them
- Move stories to different lists or boards with ease
- Create new lists to define a new section in the newsletter
- Archive stories with a few clicks
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The drag and drop UI is rad. What’s even better is how Trello instantly updates the state of a board for all users. If we’re both working on Weekly at the same time, we know it, and we don’t have to take turns by “checking out” or somehow locking the work-in-progress.
Markdown enabled
I don’t know about you, but at The Changelog we freakin’ love Markdown and write all of our content with it. If Trello didn’t support Markdown, it would’ve been a deal breaker for us.
Good thing it does. This means we can write all of our content in Markdown and Trello will display it to us the same way it’ll be rendered in Weekly.
How we do it
So that’s the why. Here’s the how.
The plan
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Each issue of Weekly gets its own board. We have a board called “Weekly - Boilerplate” that is a skeleton of what a new issue needs. We copy that to a new board and we’re ready to roll. Anytime we learn something new or make a change, we update the boilerplate and any future issues will inherit the new stuff.
I’ll explain how it works, but let me first save 1,000 words. Here’s a screengrab of the Trello board for Weekly - Issue #33 (click for full res version):
And here is the Issue that the board produced (click for full res version):
(The archive for that issue is here, if that’s easier on your eyes.)
The first list in Trello (named “Meta”) is unique. Each issue needs some customizations, such as the date, preview text (what people see in their inbox previews), and an Editor’s Note. This list gets processed first and discarded.
Each subsequent list in Trello represents a section in Weekly (Latest Episode, Headlines, Projects and Repos, etc.). Each card in the Trello list is the respective story in Weekly. The Trello card titles become Weekly story titles, and we use labels (that blue one is for sponsored content. We also use an orange label for drafts) to customize certain stories.
We put each story’s content in the Description field for the card in Trello (which is parsed with Markdown). Each story also needs a link, since the entire point of Weekly is to provide interesting & useful links. There are two ways we can add the story’s link:
- The first line in the description is a URL followed by a blank line
- The URL is added as an attachment to the card
We thought having the option would be nice, but in practice we only use the first method, since it’s less steps than the second.
The tools
How does this all happen for us? Via the Trello API. We have a sub-200 LOC Ruby script that connects to the board (using the Ruby Trello gem), loops over the lists, and outputs ERB (Ruby-embedded HTML) according to the rules laid out above. Middleman consumes that output and produces HTML that is shipped off to Campaign Monitor for delivery.
At the end of the day, Adam just has to execute a simple Rake command to kick the entire process off:
This kicks off a call to the Trello API and looks for a board with the slug weekly-33.
The code that performs this operation is not all that interesting. It’s also completely coupled to our specific needs. That being said, here is a gist that shows exactly how we do it. You’ll need to adapt this to your circumstances.
Possible improvements
We love using Trello as a CMS. But the tools could be improved. Here’s a few possible improvements:
- Remove Middleman from the workflow. The importer could generate the final HTML itself.
- Optimize API usage. Right now it takes up to 60 seconds to run the importer. This is not a huge deal, because we only to it a few times per week, but it could be better. I’m sure we’re hitting the API more than we need to, which accounts for most of the run time.
- Make it generic. It’d be rad if we could genericize the code and start an open source project around it. If anybody is interested in that, holler and we can discuss the possibilities.
Board Building Blocks
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Now that you have a better understanding of the Trello app, it’s time to look at five ways you can use Trello to get a lot more bang for your productivity buck.
Let’s look at how to use Trello to:
- Track
- Store
- Share
- Discuss
- Mix n' Match
Trello For Tracking
By far the most popular way to use Trello is for tracking tasks in either projects or processes. Projects tend to have a start and end date, like planning an event or building a new feature, whereas processes tend to be ongoing, like day to day operations for a business, or managing an editorial calendar.
On these boards, cards represent tasks that need to get done, and lists often represent a series of steps. The list structure can be as simple as To Do, Doing, and Done, or as detailed as your process needs to be, and cards move left to right as they go from start to finished.
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Useful Features:
- Drag and Drop - Drag and drop cards across lists to show progress, and move cards up and down a list to prioritize.
- Due Dates - Add due dates to cards to stay on deadline, and mark the due date done when it’s complete.
- Add Members - Assign tasks by adding members to cards so that everyone can easily see who is doing what.
- Checklists - Break down tasks into their key components and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Trello For Storing
Trello boards are also a great way to visually store resources and build living documents. Some great examples of using Trello boards for storing are employee manuals, team resources, and even favorite recipes.
On these boards, lists often represent buckets or categories, and make it easy to sort and organize information. Cards are created for each item with additional information in the card’s description, relevant links, and attachments all stored on each card.
Useful Features
- Attachments - Attach files from your computer or popular cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive via Power-Ups to organize documents, files, and assets.
- Markdown - Create more clear and organized card descriptions with Markdown formatting. Markdown lets you add headers, bulleted lists, italics, bold, links and more to your text.
- Labels - Tag cards with labels and then use the filter feature to quickly surface all of the cards with a related tag. Use grey labels if you don’t want labels to appear on the front of a card, but still want to be able to filter.
- Search - Use Trello’s robust search feature to pull up any card that you are looking for. Create as many cards as you want, and Trello will make it easy for you to always find them.
Trello For Sharing
Often lots of work is getting done by different departments, across many different boards, and you need a centralized location for people to share what they are doing to keep colleagues or clients informed. Create a Company Overview board or department level board that captures the big picture of what’s getting done across your entire team, or create a roadmap to share with clients or users what’s being worked on.
Lists might be created for each month or fiscal quarter, and cards, representing projects, are added to the corresponding list for when that project is going to be worked on or completed. Cards should be updated on a regular basis with status updates, milestone achievements, and deliverables.
Useful Features:
- Card and Board Attachments - Attach related project boards and cards so that team members can hop into the details and get access to where work is getting done.
- Comments - Use comments to provide regular status updates because they will automatically leave a timestamp of when that comment was added.
- Card Aging Power-Up - Enable the Card Aging Power-Up on your board, which fades out inactive cards over time, to instantly see which cards have not been recently updated.
Trello For Discussing
Let’s face it, there is nothing worse than a schedule packed with too many meetings that have no agenda whatsoever. Using Trello to organize meetings lets you bring your agenda to life, whether it’s a 1 to 1, team meeting, retrospective or town hall. Plus, because Trello works in real time, everyone will be able to stay in sync in Trello as well as the meeting.
On these boards, create a list for items to be discussed during the next meeting to set a clear agenda. Before each meeting begins, create a new list with the date of the meeting on it, and as cards are discussed move them from the “to be discussed” list to the list you just created. When all of the cards have been moved over, the meeting is done. Or, if there is an item that needs follow-up next meeting, leave it in the “to be discussed” list for next time.
For retrospectives after a sprint or when a big project comes to conclusion, consider a different list setup: What went well?, What needs to change?, Questions and discussion, and Action items. Have your team add cards to each list in advance to keep your retrospective structured, and save enough time to get through each card.
- Whereby Power-Up - Add a dedicated Whereby video room to your board, and copy and paste your meeting board’s link into Whereby to embed the board in your video chat.
- Copy board - Use the board copy feature to set up a template board for recurring meetings with the same format every time and copy the template to save a few minutes.
- Related cards and boards - Attach related Trello cards and boards to agenda items to be discussed so that everyone can jump into the details to get more perspective.
- Voting Power-Up - See what ideas and topics matters most to your team with the Voting Power-Up, which enables members to vote on cards.
Mix N' Match
The great thing about the flexibility of Trello is that you can mix and match and combine all of these different concepts however you like on a single Trello board.
For instance, a project board can also include lists of stored information like resources, documentation, and inspiration.
Or, a sharing board where members of a marketing department provide a high level view of the projects being worked on, but can also include discussion lists for weekly meetings.
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The idea here is that Trello boards are completely customizable, and we hope that with these building blocks you can build a board to suit your unique needs.
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