I’ve long maintained two Tasks Pro databases. This made little sense—even though one of them ostensibly had lots of people helping me out in my hobby involved, I was the main one using it. I finally got to neglecting the hobby database, to lots of bad effects. BAD effects. So I decided to merge them. This took some planning and some execution, so I wrote it up as I did it as a tutorial for someone else crazy enough to make the same move.

Great write up from Geof.

#

UPDATE 9:33PM PST: All accounts have been upgraded and are now running Tasks Pro™ 1.7.1/Tasks™ 2.7.1.

Here is the list of changes since the previous 1.7 and 2.7 releases:

• Only send one e-mail to a user per task update (sometimes could send an “updated” and “completed” e-mail)
• Change URL in e-mails to crowdfavorite.net (password e-mails)
• When no groups exist in the system, the mailboxes screen shouldn’t show the groups area
• When only 1 user in the system, the created by/assigned to in a mailbox shouldn’t be editable
• Login logo links to crowdfavorite.net instead of taskspro.com
• (none) added to the list of available search items for tags
• Tag auto-complete is disabled in IE6 due to compatibility issues
• Dynamically create password fields when user clicks “change password” to avoid browser autocomplete bugs
• Str to lower the y/m/d date format letters to avoid data input issues
• Favorites should leave the list if not sticky and 100% complete
• Function to trim strings is multi-byte aware (if supported by your PHP install)
• Calendar text in the pop-up calendar is too light w/ dark theme
• User Permission for editing tasks also applies to editing tags
• Fixed JS error that would occur when a non-english language was used and tagging was disabled
• Support for partial hour time differences, 6.5 hours for example
• Fixed an issue with the build script to make sure proper docs are included in Tasks Pro
• Dates range searches should all go back to historical date years
• Typo caused some combinations of status searches to fail
• Updated ADOdb to version 4.9.4
• Updated YUI to version 2.2.2
• Updated PHPiCalendar to version 2.24
• Disabled some PHP Tag Engine debugging output code
• Add check for the PHP readfile function and not use it if it is not available

The changes since the release candidate are a new version of PHP iCalendar with a patch to allow URL based authentication to work properly, and changing all King Design references to Crowd Favorite.

As always, these are available for download on the Crowd Favorite download page.

If you have any problems, please let me know in the forums or via the support form. Thanks!

I’m quite pleased that the .7 releases were very solid, not requiring any immediate .1 follow-up releases, however there are a number of little issues that have been fixed in the new versions.

Normally I push the .1 releases out without a release candidate, but an extra week or two of testing is always a good idea, especially when I’ve updated a number of packages.

Changes/fixes in this release:

• Only send one e-mail to a user per task update (sometimes could send an “updated” and “completed” e-mail)
• Change URL in e-mails to kingdesign.net (password e-mails)
• When no groups exist in the system, the mailboxes screen shouldn’t show the groups area
• When only 1 user in the system, the created by/assigned to in a mailbox shouldn’t be editable
• Login logo links to kingdesign.net instead of taskspro.com
• (none) added to the list of available search items for tags
• Tag auto-complete is disabled in IE6 due to compatibility issues
• Dynamically create password fields when user clicks “change password” to avoid browser autocomplete bugs
• Str to lower the y/m/d date format letters to avoid data input issues
• Favorites should leave the list if not sticky and 100% complete
• Function to trim strings is multi-byte aware (if supported by your PHP install)
• Calendar text in the pop-up calendar is too light w/ dark theme
• User Permission for editing tasks also applies to editing tags
• Fixed JS error that would occur when a non-english language was used and tagging was disabled
• Support for partial hour time differences, 6.5 hours for example
• Fixed an issue with the build script to make sure proper docs are included in Tasks Pro
• Dates range searches should all go back to historical date years
• Typo caused some combinations of status searches to fail
• Updated ADOdb to version 4.9.4
• Updated YUI to version 2.2.2
• Updated PHPiCalendar to version 2.23
• Disabled some PHP Tag Engine debugging output code
• Add check for the PHP readfile function and not use it if it is not available

As always, these are available for download on the King Design download page.

If you have any problems, please let me know in the forums or via the support form. Thanks!

My reaction was basically:

I don’t need it now, but it seems like something that could be useful to have in the future.

As such, I didn’t place a huge amount of value on the domain. I offered $50 and he counter offered at $2500. Needless to say, I didn’t end up buying it.

However, late last year (a year later) I was contacted again by the same fellow. Turns out he hadn’t sold the domain and it was about to expire, so he asked if my previous offer of $50 was still on the table.

Sure – I’ll take it for $50.

I still don’t have a current use for using the domain, so for now I’ve pointed it at the Tasks™ home page (kingdesign.net/tasks/). Maybe you have some suggestions.

UPDATE: We took the Use Tasks service offline for a couple of hours tonight to perform a variety of upgrades:

• All multi-user accounts have been upgraded to Tasks Pro™ 1.7.
• All single-user accounts have been upgraded to Tasks™ 2.7.
• All accounts are now accessible at http://your-account.usetasks.com/ as well as the previous URL structure of http://www.usetasks.com/tasks/your-account/
• Links to update billing information and to cancel your account were added to all accounts. These links are only visible in multi-user accounts if your user has permission to configure your server settings.

Note: if you want to use the new tagging features available to you, you need to first enable them in your Server Settings. Please see the “Tagging” section in the documentation (Tasks Pro™, Tasks™) for more information.

If you run into any trouble, please let us know in the forums.

1. English (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8)
2. French
3. German (ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8)
4. Norwegian
5. Spanish

Tasks Pro™ and Tasks™ customers can also download these language packs on the King Design web site.

http://www.taskspro.com

to:

http://crowdfavorite.net/tasks-pro/

I thought it might be interesting (instructive?) to review the reasons for this, and how I got into the situation in the first place.

When I launched alexking.org back in 2002, I put up some of my projects here for download. This included the original Tasks™ (now Tasks Jr.). As support for Tasks™ grew, I received a number of requests to create a multi-user version of Tasks™ (which you know as Tasks Pro™).

I’d been using King Design (kingdesign.net) on-again/off-again since 1997, mainly as a web design and hosting storefront. I’d actually taken down the entire site back in 2003 as I wasn’t doing any outside work at the time anyway.

When I was getting ready to launch Tasks Pro™, it was my first commercial product and I hadn’t decided:

1. if I was going to continue using the King Design name, and
2. if I was going to offer any other commercial products

and I was able to register taskspro.com, which definitely seemed like a good choice to use for the product site. So when I launched Tasks Pro™ (and until this week), its home was at taskspro.com.

Everything seemed to make sense to me at the time:

• Non-commercial software was at alexking.org
• Tasks Pro™ had its own web site and store

But soon after launching Tasks Pro™, I started hearing from my Tasks™ users that wanted some of the new features in Tasks Pro™ but didn’t need the multi-user capabilities. And pretty soon, I had a commercial version of Tasks™ out as well.

At first, I kept both the commercial version and free version of Tasks™ on alexking.org. After all, people were already coming to alexking.org for Tasks™, so offering both versions there made a certain amount of sense. But it was awkward having that lone commercial product on the site. At this time, kingdesign.net was still a landing page.

When I completed the first major update to Tasks Pro™ and Tasks™ (versions 1.5 and 2.5 respectively), I decided to re-launch the King Design web site as my business storefront. In doing so, I moved the Tasks™ home to kingdesign.net. However, I already had a full site for Tasks Pro™ at taskspro.com and already had traffic, etc. there¹; so instead of moving Tasks Pro™ to kingdesign.net, I left it at taskspro.com and created a summary page pointing to taskspro.com on kingdesign.net.

While this wasn’t a horrible solution it had some definite drawbacks:

• I had ‘purchase’, ‘download’, ‘contact’ and ‘support’ mechanisms at both sites (I migrated all of the downloads and support to kingdesign.net over time).
• I had documentation at both sites, but only had FAQs on kingdesign.net.
• New visitors would have to switch between two sites to compare the products.
• Visitors hitting taskspro.com would sometimes miss the links to Tasks™ and contact me to ask about a single user version (meaning many more probably didn’t bother).
• My flagship product had a rather weak representation on my business site.

With all of this in mind, I knew I needed to migrate Tasks Pro™ to kingdesign.net. However, there are other factors to consider as well. For one, taskspro.com has a pretty decent Google ranking. In addition, I’ve had customers going to taskspro.com for three years now. I couldn’t just cut it off entirely.

So with the new releases, I finally bit the bullet and moved all of the primary Tasks Pro™ content to kingdesign.net. I didn’t get rid of the taskspro.com site entirely though.

• There are still active trials of Tasks Pro™ on taskspro.com – I didn’t want to mess with moving them.
• I wanted a transition time for folks used to going to taskspro.com to make their way to kingdesign.net.
• As previously mentioned, taskspro.com shows up pretty well in Google, and I didn’t want to give that up right away.

So now taskspro.com is a landing page of sorts, with minimal information and pointers to kingdesign.net. Over time I may deprecate it further, perhaps to the point where it merely directs people to kingdesign.net/tasks-pro/ the way tasks.biz² points to kingdesign.net/tasks/.

Now that I’ve made the move, I feel good about it and I’m glad I did it. That normally means it was the right decision.

1. Plus re-doing something that already “works” when there is so much new work to be done it a tough thing to prioritize. [back]
2. I’ll follow-up on this in a future post. [back]

New features:

• Tagging!
• Per tag RSS feeds.
• Per tag iCalendars.
• Searching and browsing by tag.
• Editing and appending tags to multiple tasks at once.
• Globally edit tag names.
• Globally delete tags.
• Showing the “Closing Notes” form when the Mark Complete button is clicked is now a per-user option.
• Ability to add time when marking a task complete (if you have “Closing Notes” enabled).
• Icon to indicate recurring tasks.
• Font size setting (per user) in preferences.
• Task lists now show 200 items.
• History screen now shows the last 100 modified tasks.
• Attached files are now links in the RSS feeds.
• Task URLs are included in the iCalendar item description since Google Calendar seems to ignore the URL field.
• Latest version of PHP iCalendar and ADOdb.
• Added ‘completed’ class to completed tasks for use in themes.
• Faster page loads.
• Added advanced configuration options (manual config file edit) for turning off checking for new versions and disabling gzip output (since this caused issues in very rare cases).
• Discontinued support for MySQL 3.x.
• Updated and expanded documentation.

These also include a few bug fixes and enhancements:

• Accesskeys work in IE.
• Date range searches work properly.
• File uploads work properly in MS SQL Server.
• E-mail subject prefix works properly.
• Reduce server load when creating RSS feeds and iCalendars for a task and all sub-tasks.
• Better compatibility for an alternative e-mail attachment formats (e-mail to task feature).
• ‘Mark complete and attach sub-tasks to parent task’ works properly.
• Support for file:\\ as an URL prefix (the proper file:// was already supported).
• Opera mini is now propery detected as a mobile browser.
• The e-mail to task feature now works properly with most quoted-printable e-mails.
• Upgrade from Tasks Jr. works properly again
• Additional changes to improve MS SQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

With the addition of tagging, Tasks Pro™ and Tasks™ are more Getting Things Done (GTD) compliant than ever.

I also made an adjustment to the free trials so that the date the trial expires is shown in the trial itself. This had been a rarely requested addition, but the folks that did were rather upset that the trial had expired on them unexpectedly . Sometimes severity trumps frequency.

These were a long time in development for seemingly few new features, but there was quite a bit that went into these releases besides the features and bug fixes. The new store and support options were added, PHP Tag Engine was created and released, and the content from the Tasks Pro™ web site (at taskspro.com) was finally integrated into the King Design web site (at kingdesign.net/tasks-pro/).

If you want to try the online demo or a free trial of Tasks Pro™, those are now hosted on kingdesign.net instead of taskspro.com. I believe I’ve set up all the necessary redirects.

As the Panic guys say: get your upgrade quick – there’s only a small window to get a major “dot” release before the inevitable “dot one” release.

The new store page allows customers to choose any/all products they want to buy, including support and installation service, then check out in a single transaction. Checking out in a single transaction was possible before, but you had to know to click ‘back’ and add something else to the cart at the SWREG store. This new page allows you to choose everything at once, then enter the store – a much smoother shopping experience.

I’ve also launched the premium support options I’ve discussed previously. These are available immediately, with premium support tokens available for sale on the store page. I’ve even got a page for retrieving support tokens if you misplace them.

Of course, behind the scenes with all of this is a back-end system for token creation, processing, etc. – it’s worked well in my testing thus far.

To offer phone support, I decided to sign up for a virtual PBX system. I choose to go with a OneBox Executive¹ account because it is a lot cheaper than the multi-user offerings I saw at most places – features I don’t need. I’ll do a more thorough review of this once I’ve used it longer, but so far I like it.

Now that I’m offering live support, I also need to be able to schedule this support. I’ve set up a free/busy calendar that customers can look at to choose an available time when requesting support. The data for this comes from a combination of several of my Google Calendars and is updated every 15 minutes – more on this in a follow-up post as well.

If you see any problems with these new features or have constructive feedback, I’d love to hear it.

Oh, I also added a testimonials page that has a bunch of customer quotes – stuff that folks have generously sent in for this purpose over the years. I had to migrate the data over from it’s previous home and look everything over to make sure it came over properly. It was nice to re-read some of the kind things these folks have said about m and my products.

It was a pretty heavy working weekend for me, but I got a lot of stuff done.

Still a few more things to finish up before the new Tasks Pro™ and Tasks™ releases, but I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now. Yay!

1. That link has a referral ID in it for me to get a free month of service if you sign up. [back]

I gave up on my work data recovery last week and I’m pretty much done re-doing the web site work I lost with my hard drive troubles. These include a new store page and some other little things I’d been wanting to add for a while.

Of course, as I’ve got all this stuff done some other things have come up. I’m going to be moving all of my sites to a new server soon (I’m supposed to get the server info today so I can begin transferring things over). When I put out a new release, I normally get a lot of folks signing up for free trials. I don’t want to interrupt those free trials with a server move if possible.

Assuming the new server is ready as scheduled, making the server switch first shouldn’t delay things too badly. Anyway, I wanted to provide an update on what was going on.

When all of this is done, I will have have made a lot of really good behind the scenes changes – internal house-keeping and improved infrastructure. In other words, future releases should be quite a bit easier. I’m looking forward to getting these out and beginning work on some cool new features.

UPDATE 2006-01-11: The new server has now been delayed, I’ll make a determination early next week to decide if I wait for it or not.

Changes since the last release:

• Language selection is properly applied to PHP Tag Engine as well (some version .7 language files are now available for download).
• Added advanced configuration options (manual config file edit) for turning off checking for new versions and disabling gzip output (since this caused issues in very rare cases).
• Support for file:\\ as an URL prefix (the proper file:// was already supported).
• Updated to ADOdb 4.9.3.
• Fixed an edge-case tagging bug.

The downloads, as always, are available from the King Design download page.

I’ve also determined the premium support options I’ll be rolling out with this release. First, let me stress that the current free support options will continue to be offered:

• 200+ pages of documentation per product.
• Searchable FAQs.
• Customer support forums.
• E-mail support.

In addition to these, I’m adding phone support and priority e-mail support (jump to the front of the line). Customers will be able to purchase individual support tickets, discounted blocks of three support tickets or an annual support subscription which will also include any paid upgrades during that year. Hopefully this will be welcome news to those customers who have been asking for phone and priority support for some time now.

For those who use stylus based PDAs/phones (e.g., Treos) this isn’t an issue because the screen is larger. I’m a longtime PocketPC user until recently. But when using a BlackBerry to enter tasks, the user has to scroll back up to the top to press the Save button. If that button could be replicated under the task entry data, that would help non-stylus users by requiring less scrolling.

I may implement his suggestion in a future release, but as a BlackBerry user myself, I was able to suggest the following work-arounds:

1. Hit the enter key in a single line text field
2. Use the T key to get back to the top of the screen
3. Set up a mailbox so you can just send in e-mails to create tasks

I generally use #3 myself. It is faster to not have to wait for the web form to load and works (the e-mails are queued) offline (airplanes, etc.) as well.

If you are running a .7 pre-release and see any IE 7 issues, please let me know or post in the forums.

On a somewhat related note, IE 6 CSS tweaks for alexking.org 2.0 only took an hour or so. I guess I’m getting better at avoiding IE 6 CSS issues. Kudos to Microsoft for not needing any of these layout tweaks¹ in IE 7 – amazing, IE 7 renders a pure XHTML/CSS layout just like Firefox and Safari does. Whoohoo!

1. It did need a couple of slight styling tweaks and I had to disable a feature for IE users. [back]

• PostgreSQL 8 compatibility changes.
• MS SQL tagging compatibility changes.
• Reduce server load when creating RSS feeds and iCalendars for a task and all sub-tasks.
• Add compatibility for an alternative e-mail attachment format (e-mail to task feature).
• “Mark complete and attach sub-tasks to parent task” works properly.
• Updated to latest version Yahoo! UI library.
• Updated to latest version of ADOdb.

A few folks have asked me if these are ready for production use, and the answer is yes. This would have been the final release if the web site changes and other supporting materials were ready to go. The full .7 releases will be posted once the online demo, free trials, support changes, etc. are all ready. Unfortunately, all of that stuff takes way more time than I’d like it to.