Results of Wekan Survey 2020-01

Wekan Survey 2020-01 was done at January – June 2020.

Stats about survey participants

  • Total 155 persons from EU, America and Asia did participate to survey.
  • They did have about 1-800 users of Wekan, some did say number of users will grow.
  • Wekan is in use at government of 2 countries.
  • Some are currently integrating Wekan to their platforms.

Bugfix Requests

  • Bugfixes
  • More scalability
  • Make performance match Trello
  • More stability
  • Fix rising CPU load
  • Sometimes long lists are not downloaded completely, and view still in “waiting” or “progress icon”.
  • Big Descriptions on Firefox, some troubles with this.
  • “We have tried using Wekan as a replacement for Trello, but there quite a few UI glitches and bugs, and we could not import our Trello board properly, so we just thought the project was too young for us to use it. We were very surprised to ready that so many people use it, because we tried it twice in the past couple of months and we encountered a few bugs within the first few minutes. This app has a huge potential, but I think you’d benefit from a good redesign of the UI. Find a good design company, with a nice design, you’ll be a killer app!” (What bugs you had when importing? What other bugs did you find? How should design be improved? Please add new GitHub issues about them with more details, if there is not yet issues about those).

Amount of features in Wekan

  • Some would like more ways to hide current features. Since starting survey, there has been added Board Settings / Card Settings where it’s possible to hide most fields of cards.
  • Some would like to have more features
  • Some do not yet know all features of Wekan

Feature Requests

  • Gantt Chart is most requested
  • Organizing cards as a mindmap (extra view) would be nice. The parent nodes in the mindmap could be the kanban boards column headers for start – with cards as children. The parent nodes text should be changable – without relations to kanban board columns as well.
  • Option to display checklist on minicard
  • https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-repeater
  • Calendar sync and Caldav
  • System wide labels
  • Viewer and card plugins to extend / replace standard views/cards
  • Features that help build integrations and in system automation
  • Background image
  • Directory like feature to organise dashboards by categories
  • Possibility to create global templates (templates created by admin and marcked as global for example will be availabale for every other user)
  • “Template, wish it could be shared between users.”
  • In lists, sorting cards by due date
  • More complete API that covers more features
  • More complete Webhooks that covers more features
  • Adjust Cardsize when opened to get more info on comments
  • Save data of Teams/Organizations to different databases
  • More team working features: ldap, groups, management, assignment, more privilege levels
  • Option to lock down/delegate the editing/movement of specific cards, lanes, or columns to specific users or owners.
  • “Allow to link other cards. In Trello, i can add another card as an annex. Also, when i put the link to other card it is rendered as an icon and the card text. This is something that i use to organize the relationships between cards.”
  • Insert youtube videos in the cards. (That feature was previously removed from Wekan because of XSS security issue. It’s not known yet how to add it safely).
  • “Adding multiple users by email is nice, but I would like to also predefine their other contact/profile info like full name and password”
  • “Features are great, but I believe Wekan also needs to focus on refining what’s already there. The websites need refinement too, so they can attract more users!” (Refine features and website how?)
  • Collapsable swimlane
  • Collapsable Lists(groups)

Integration Feature Requests

  • Integrate ticketing like osTicket/Zammad
  • Nextcloud integation
  • WordPress integration
  • Easy integration with Gitea or Gogs
  • MediaWiki integration

Import/Export Feature Requests

  • Export column/list as text (to send a reporting at the end of the week)
  • Printable Export board to PDF
  • Project structure plan – would be possible with special export function which allows to choose the level export depth (Screenshot mockup? More details?)

Feature Requests that need more details to provide at GitHub issues

  • Adding web hook notification
  • Adding sub tasks could look nicer
  • When I comment I want to tag people
  • Design improvements (What improvements?)
  • “I feel the design a little unfinished” (What should be changed?)
  • Person-based view
  • Project structure plan
  • CI Branding
  • Dependencies among tasks
  • Dashboard to show quick status of kanban boards
  • Quicker deletion e.g. with a mouseover delete icon.
  • Quicker adding labels, again maybe with a little mouseover icon.
  • A default checklist called “TODO” (maybe configurable) would be nice, so we don’t have to create a new checklist for every item. (Is this related to better templates?)
  • Custom field “view” on mini cards is a bit weird. Would be cool if it looks like a table or tags or so.
  • Issue inbox from e-mail.
  • Easily host on a Raspberry Pi (How easily?)
  • Long term support, a way to upgrade version without pain. (What pain you have?)
  • Theme could use a change into more “cleaner” view. (Screenshot mockup? More details?)
  • Currently Wekan has a lot of features but they are not the most convenient or they are complex or hidden too much. (How to make them easier?)
  • Switch off idiotic dragging handles and reverse back to drag a post behavior. (Drag handles on mobile make possible moving around board. Without handle, cards start moving immediately, or cards can not be moved at all. With handles, both moving and dragging are possible and visible. There is no delay drag on webbrowser, delay drag and double click are native app features)
  • Sub boards – yet they are really confusing (Do you mean Subtasks? How should they work?)
  • Fast task edit: maj + click on a task in board view to display same form as adding a task (Is there typo in “maj”, what does it mean? Please explain with screenshot mockups).
  • Report generation is a crucial feature in companies like mine where it is compulsory to track changes and activity. (What kind of reports?)
  • Members’ workload per day for each board and for all boards. This will help in assigning activities. (Screenshot mockup?)
  • Using the database in other ways : extract, query, automation. (More details? Screenshot mockup?)
  • Quick Filter like in JIRA: Custom Buttons, to filter to bord to custom filters. (More details? Screenshot mockup?)
  • Filter by “Cards have not label xy”. (More details? Screenshot mockup?)
  • adv. Filter Queries to filter by label not only Custom Fields. (More details? Screenshot mockup?)
  • Rule to fill custom date field, e.g. move card to list x; set CustomDate Field CustomerFeedbackStart to now. (More details? Screenshot mockup?)
  • Card status: to do, work in progress, done, archived. (Screenshot mockup? More details?)
  • “Some rules where I have access to the user in the action section. eg: When Card is moved, add the user who has moved the card as member.”

Feature wishes for something very different than Wekan

  • NPM-free (Wekan uses many NPM modules to implement current Wekan features)
  • As lightweight as possible, minimum files and directories to look into. The idea is to make it as fast collaboration / visualized data storage tool as possible, which could be up from source and running anywhere in no time. (Maybe this means some compiled programming language? Some compilers like FreePascal/Lazarus and Go do compile fast to single executeable. FreePascal is adding more old and new platforms, Go seems to remove support for old platforms. Wekan is 13 years of programming work, is there funding for a rewrite? Do all current Wekan dependencies also exist for new programming language?)

Already implemented and fixed requests

  • Disabling drag on desktop forced us to stop updating Wekan. From that point forward everybody stopped caring about new releases. (It is possible to drag on desktop and on mobile. Newest Wekan has newest features, security fixes etc).
  • Wekan should be systemd-free (Wekan already is, it works with only Node.js and MongoDB with start-wekan.sh or .bat, see bundle install info at https://wekan.github.io )
  • “Please consider offering a standalone app for Windows. The instructions so far do not work well in Windows.” (Install info should work now).
  • “Please consider offering an official iOS or Android app (on open source basis). Wekan has so much potential and is even better than some other commercial solutions.” (Wekan is now available as PWA).
  • Touch Screen Support on Windows Tablet Mode (It should work now, please add new GitHub issue if it does not work).
  • “Making a view type a default for all viewers, like swimlanes.”
  • “It would be very helpful if there is a documentation on upgrades, especially for Docker-compose repository.” (docker-compose stop, docker rm wekan-app, change docker-compose.yml version tag like image:wekanteam/wekan:v4.17 to newer version, docker-compose up -d)

About funding Wekan developent, and Wekan Business Model

  • Some would like to have paid user and developer documentation and training
  • Paid hosting so you don’t need to manage your own servers push button setup for a monthly fee, small user numbers (Paid hosting is available at https://wekan.team/commercial-support/ but it is “contact by email” and not “push button” because closest available server is selected to minimize latency).
  • “I think the model should maybe not be based on features. Currently it is free. If you will stay competitive to Trello or something there must be add much more features. If you want to get paid for it I would suggest to provide a wekan system as services in all public clouds and support. Maybe some extra cloud features can be sold. But I’m not a sales man… 🙂 There are many good features, but i think the best point is, that its easy to use. The acceptence for using it will fall within minutes, also at strange colleagues…” (Contact https://wekan.team/commercial-support/ , support and paid managed hosting at all public clouds, private clouds and local computers is now available. There is not yet convincing strange colleagues as a service. What other business models there could be?)
  • “Bugs are to biggest show stopper – I am willing to pay, when I see, that my previous jobs are done.” (Yes, paid features/fixes will be implemented).
  • “I would be willing to donate to the project, though funds are limited. I am fortunate enough to have more than enough employment through COVID-19 and this service has been a huge help already after only 1 months of implementations. I love it all so far and hope to see it progress.” (Thanks! Yes, payments for features, fixes, support, and development in general at Commercial Support at https://wekan.team/commercial-support/ make possible Wekan Team working full time on Wekan features/fixes/releases, although more funding would make faster progress possible. Worldwide Wekan contributors that send pull requests for features and fixes also make possible even faster progress).