What’s Next for UpStream? Custom Fields

At the beginning of December, we launched a new version of UpStream which added support for WordPress comments. This allows you to have a conversation about any aspect of your UpStream projects.

What’s next on the UpStream roadmap? Custom fields.

These will allow you to create all sorts of extra information for your milestones, tasks, bugs, and files. For example, in a web design project, the bugs could have fields for the browser type, PHP version, and screen size.

In this post, I’m going to tell you about our plans and what you can expect in the next few weeks.

Custom Fields in UpStream

UpStream is built using a framework called CMB2. OSTraining has an explanation of what CMB2 is.

We, and hundreds of other plugin developers, use CMB2 because it allows us to build features more quickly and reliably.

Custom fields is a good example of CMB2 can help. We’re going to use the field types that CMB2 supports.These include:

• Single-line text fields
• Large text areas
• Time picker
• Date Picker
• Color picker
• Checkboxes
• Radio buttons
• WordPress categories
• WordPress tags
• Image / File uploads
• Image Gallery
• Embeds (Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
• Repeatable field groups

How We Plan to Use Custom Fields

The plan is to use for custom fields to provide many of the items on the UpStream roadmap.

For example, think about “Sub-tasks” where you have to complete several small items in order to finish the big task. We can solve that with custom fields. Each sub-task can be a required checkbox.

To take another example: “Time-tracking”. We can add a field to each task to store the time taken to complete the task.

This approach to custom fields can also solve some other feature requests. Some busy project managers have asked for a way to categorize tasks, bugs and files. With custom fields, you’ll be able to do that using categories and tags.

Getting Started

We’re going to start with several fields including single-line text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, and several others. After the initial launch, we’ll add as many extra fields as we can.

This custom fields feature will be a released a commercial extension.

If you’d like to test a beta version, please email help@upstreamplugin.com. We hope to have a release available for testing in December.