Introducing Kanban: advanced, customizable, and pretty

Whenever the word “Kanban” comes up, what do you think of? Task trackers, CRMs, marketplaces, and cards you can move from one status to another in general. 

We’ve already mentioned a while ago why Trello sucked (in our own particular case), and it’s a situation for many a business out there. Revolving through task trackers is similar to going through comms apps: Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, you name it. Takes a while to find a good fit.

Why keep trying to find something that looks like a kanban board when you can just build it yourself? It’s been long overdue since no-code Kanban functionality became a drag-n-drop element in Directual as well, and here it is.

What can Kanban do in Directual?

Pretty much everything your standard Kanban board app is capable of, and then some. Here’s the kicker: based on the configuration, as soon as the card is dragged to the next status, a scenario (of any complexity) of your choosing can be triggered. 

For instance: you move a card to another status and Directual can..

• Notify the responsible manager 
• Pull external API
• Change permissions
• Perform actions based on different databases, roles, and external systems
• Cancel drag-n-drop if there is a logical conflict

In case you’d like to see how it works live, try out right here (or visit the live-demo page):

The examples above are available in a Kanban demo template:

The Kanban component can (and definitely should) be used for more than just basic internal apps and to-do boards. Go big and build CRMs, enrich your SaaS with Kanban boards, and automate your business processes. 

How to set up Kanban

Well, let’s have a look-see at how you can get your own Kanban board going in just about 5 minutes. 

Step 1: Configure the endpoint

First, you need to choose the endpoint with the following fields:

• Stage (column): it’s a field type link connected to the directory structure
• Weight: a decimal type field for sorting data within a column from small to large. As soon as the user dragged an item, the weight is saved from 0 to N for the whole column.

Step 2: Configure the Kanban board

It’s also pretty simple:

• Choose the stage (column field)
• Choose the weight field
• Choose enable or disable for drag and drop
• Click "Reset the list" to get the stages from the linked data structure

Step 3: Configure card view and extras

The entire process here is very similar to our standard card configuration, which also takes just a few minutes to set up. 

Ta-daaa, done! But that is not all…

Making custom design Kanban cards

On top of everything else, you can customize the Kanban cards by configuring HTML based on object data the way you like. Check out the example of what your Kanban cards can look like below:

Looks nice, huh? To provide you with an idea of complexity, here’s how the data structure looks like:

And now let’s take a look at the page settings. What we have here is just two components:

Kanban card settings, on the other hand, look like this. Finally, that’s where the component’s HTML code is supplemented with custom CSS (you can also use the same feature for any page!):

In case you liked the pretty Kanban design above (have a look at the live-demo), here’s an opportunity to grab for yourself right here:

Afterword

Kanban is a staple of so many different businesses and workflows all over. Sometimes, it pays to have your own kanban, built just the way you need it, at no chance of downtime. Try it yourself, and if you’ve got questions or suggestions, you know where to find us: hello@directual.com