Hi hacknplanners,

After so much hard work, sweat and tears, the major update of HacknPlan is finally out! We are so happy to see it live and also expectant to see how you guys receive it. We are aware that this update introduces so many structural changes and you may feel a bit lost or overwhelmed at first. However, we truly believe once you get used to it, you are going to love how the new interface and features improve your productivity and your overall user experience.

This is the first and most breaking of a series of releases that will add all the improvements we announced back in the day, which will come out during the next months in smaller updates. You can review all the changes included in this update here:

For those very used to the old interface who feel a bit lost, these are some tips that will help you find the section or action you are looking for:

What we used to call Milestones, are now called Boards, so they are kanban boards with optional start and due dates. Additionally, there are Milestones which are entities you can use to group Boards under a bigger goal for a better and more comprehensive organization of your roadmap.

What we used to call Organization (an entity which contains projects, such as your personal one or the ones created by Studio subscriptions) are now called Workspaces.

Everything is accessible through the left menu directly, so all the sections of your project or workspace are there. The workspace and project dropdowns on the header are mostly the same.

All the admin actions, such as modifying the basic information of the project, manage boards and milestones, add users and edit their permissions… have been moved to the Administration section of the project, instead of being spread over the whole application. This way management is simpler and the other sections are cleaner and faster. Also, it’s more intuitive for new users to find them this way.

The Summary section and the special ones included in Studio (Project, Milestone and Team) have been rebuilt as dashboards and you can find under the Dashboard section on the left menu. You also have My Dashboard, which gives you an overview of your own work in the context of the project, board or milestone.

Despite all the visual changes and the reorganization of sections, everything keeps working the same: your kanban boards, your tasks, your design elements… Once you get used to the new UI, I’m sure you’ll love it! Not to mention the new features such as the tag system, one of the most requested features in HacknPlan history.

Besides the update, we are working on the documentation so it reflects all the new changes and will add more details which are not very well covered. You can expect it to be updated during the next few days. Also, we will be alert in order to quickly fix any bug or issue you find; we tested this deeply but with an update this big you never know. Please report anything you find so we can take care of it quickly.

Finally, please let us know what you think of the update after you have time to play with it, we designed this using a bunch of feedback we collected from you in the course of the last few years so we want to know how well we did it. We know is impossible to make everyone happy and many of you liked the application as it was, but we believe these changes will be better for most of you guys in the long run. Please share your thoughts here, on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, we’ll be happy to hear about them.

Happy planning!

#hacknplanupdate