New release: ListoWP 1.0.3

Custom list icons, collapsible sidebar, and handy UI shortcuts.

What’s new

Custom list icons

It is now possible to set a custom icon on any user-made List. Simply click the icon next to the List name, and a dedicated interface will pop up. Here you can search icons by keywords (English only) and choose one or reset back to “List initials”.

To make things easier, the search interface will attempt to search for icons relevant to the list name. If nothing is found, generic icons for “list” will be returned.

Users can now choose one of the hundreds of icons for their custom lists

List icons in Tasks

If you have a lot of custom Lists, browsing Smart Lists can become a bit confusing since you don’t always remember where you put each task. For this reason, we have added list icons inside Tasks, when viewed in the Smart List context. For example, if you are browsing Scheduled Tasks and have 20 items there, belonging to 5 different Custom Lists, you can now easily see where all Tasks are. The List icon also acts as a shortcut – clicking it will open that List.

When browsing a Smart List, a small List icon shows next in Tasks, to easier identify where they belong

Quickly showing & hiding done Tasks

The icon representing done Tasks in List headers is now a button that will quickly toggle user’s “show completed” preference. It works in every list except “Done” and “Open”. It’s now much easier to show and hide done Tasks without the need to go into preferences and change it there.

Clicking the “Done tasks” icon quickly toggles the “hide completed” user preference

Other improvements

We have added a collapse/expand button to the Lists panel on bigger screens. Collapsing will result in more space for the Tasks, and Lists will be only shown as icons. This step prepares a bigger canvas for the Columns view planned in the short future.

The “new list” and “new task” buttons have been slightly redesigned to better blend with the rest of the interface. We fixed some issues with auto-generated List initials when a List had special characters or multiple spaces in its name. A small z-index bug was fixed, which led to the date UI on done Tasks being hidden under the Tasks.

ListoWP 1.0.3 features a new design for “New…” buttons and a collapsible sidebar

Translations

All ten translations added in the previous release are still complete, meaning we took care of translating new phrases related to the new icon UI. The Japanese version of ListoWP is also in progress, currently at 70%.


Changelog

A full list of changes can be found here.

New release: ListoWP 1.0.2

We added a Russian translation – ListoWP now speaks English and 10 other languages.

What’s new

This release adds the Russian language translation provided by a professional translation team. This brings our total language count to eleven (English and ten translations).

If you would like us to add another language, or you found an issue with an existing translation, please refer to this post.


With the addition of Russian in 1.0.2, ListoWP now ships with ten translations

Changelog

A full list of changes can be found here.

New release: ListoWP 1.0.1

The first of many regular updates to ListoWP is here!

What’s new

Due date improvements

If a Task has no due date, opening the date interface will now pre-set the due date to “today” instead of staying empty. Quickly scheduling high-priority tasks is now easier.


If a Task has no due date, opening the date interface now defaults to “today”.

Loading indicators & interface responsiveness

To improve user experience and make sure we communicate well when things are processing, we added loading indicators to user preferences and the delete buttons. It should be now more clear that after clicking an option or a delete button there is some action running in the background.


Progress and success indicators were added to user preferences and delete buttons to provide a more verbose interface.

We also improved the handling of situations where rapidly clicking a button would fire an action more than once – for example when creating a Task and clicking “save” rapidly would sometimes create multiple copies of a Task.

Switching Lists now works better – the Tasks belonging to the previous List are hidden immediately, instead of waiting for the new List to load.

Translations

The following translations were completed and shipped in this release: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese & Spanish.


ListoWP 1.0.1 ships nine complete translations, with more on the way.

Changelog

A full list of changes can be found here.

New release: ListoWP 1.0.0

ListoWP 1.0.0 is out after several months of development and testing – and we couldn’t be more excited!

What is ListoWP?

In short, ListoWP is a To-Do & Reminders plugin for WordPress. It lets you and all your users privately manage their Tasks and Lists, set deadlines, and even have recurring Tasks. It features several Smart Lists that automatically collect Tasks based on their status, due dates, recurrence rules, etc.

What are the features?

Since ListoWP is a young project, and we have tons of ideas for it, the list below will probably quickly become outdated.

At present, ListoWP features Tasks with optional deadlines and recurrence rules, organized in Custom & Smart Lists. Both Tasks and Custom Lists can be easily managed with drag-and-drop. The interface is both powerful and intuitive, with a great mobile experience and fullscreen mode.

ListoWP is integrated with PeepSo, BuddyBoss, and WooCommerce – when enabled, it adds a tab in user profiles of these plugins, with the Lists & Tasks baked right in.

We have also added an optional GDPR (and similar) compliance mode which lets users delete and export all their ListoWP data in a couple of clicks.

How can it be used?

To-Do and Reminders apps in general are tools designed to improve productivity, and that’s how we see ListoWP – primarily as a productivity tool. It can help you stay organized without the need to leave your own WordPress site.

The most common usage scenario we think of when building this plugin was managing the WordPress website itself. Or any other project or business. For example, I personally use it as my work to-do list. I have one list to plan the marketing strategy, and another to take notes for blog posts & plan my content. I also use it as a general reminder system, for example for recurring tasks like “send affiliate payouts” or “pay salaries”.

Another example would be an online community. If you are running one (with a plugin like PeepSo or BuddyBoss), your users might definitely find it useful.

But like most tools, ListoWP will adapt to your ideas – it’s a blank canvas for you and your website members. Planning a trip? Check! Need to remember your anniversary? Check! Want to be reminded about a meeting? Check!

What is the development roadmap?

Our primary focus going forward will be an email notification system, so that expired (and almost expired) Tasks can be sent to you even if you’re not on the website itself. Further down the road, we plan to add a block with tasks summary (to-do, expired, etc.) to be placed in a sidebar – to provide an overview of your Tasks on any page, not just the ListoWP main page.

Later on, we plan to focus on team-based experience through shared Boards, task assignments, perhaps even comments, etc.

However, a lot will depend on your feedback to us – as we strive to build a plugin that best serves the users, we might choose to prioritize other ideas depending on how frequently requested they are. We are happy to receive suggestions for features, improvements and even bug reports (we don’t expect many of these!) through the ListoWP community and support tickets.

How is it different from other solutions?

Most importantly, there just aren’t many To-Do managers for WordPress at all. If there are, they are either purely Administrators focused, or shun the potential of letting users build their own Lists. There are, of course, thousands of apps for mobile and desktop, but as far as we found out in our research, there wasn’t anything like ListoWP for WordPress out there.

In opposition to most WordPress solutions in the market, everything in ListoWP (except stricte plugin configuration) happens in the front-end. It means your users will never have to enter the WP Admin area to manage their content. They don’t even have to be aware your website is running WordPress.

To further set itself apart from the common WordPress solutions, ListoWP is built 100% on custom database tables, to avoid clutter in the WP Posts tables and slowing down other parts of the website. Custom Post Types architecture is easy for the developers to start with, and thus is prevalent in the WordPress universe. But with complex solutions and/or plugins based heavily on user input, it can lead to many issues later on. The developers are then either doomed to perform never-ending optimization or go through a painful process of refactoring and migrating data to custom tables. I have seen the problem firsthand with Easy Digital Downloads, creating millions of entries in our WP Posts tables. Fortunately, the developers already migrated to a custom database structure. We have avoided this iceberg completely, by designing our own database structure from the get-go.

When planning the architecture, we also went with a mobile-first mindset, building everything on REST APIs. This will allow us to create native mobile apps for ListoWP in the future – if the market demand is there.