Why Templates/Recurring Tasks Before Reporting

I’ve decided to add recurring tasks and task templates to Tasks Pro™ and Tasks 2.0 before I add reporting and printable views. There are several reasons I made this decision and I’ll touch on some of them briefly here.

  • I think recurring tasks and task templates won’t take quite as long to build as the reporting functionality I have planned and I’d like to get one of these feature sets out as soon as I can.
  • Very basic reporting can already be done using the existing advanced search capabilities and/or custom database queries.
  • Adding recurring tasks and task templates is really enhancing existing functionality, not bringing new concepts into the software like reporting will.
  • Because this is more of an incremental step, making this release 1.5 and adding reporting in a 2.0 release keeps the version #s consistent.
  • I need to rewrite my internal list management code to make it more robust and flexible to support my plans for reporting and printable views.
  • People will be able to use these features immediately and create data that they will then be able to report on in the future when reporting comes along.
  • The poll I ran came up evenly split (as I expected), so I’m left with the above criteria to make my decision.

I know there are people eagery awaiting reporting that won’t be happy with this decision, but I think it is the right decision for the product. Comments are open.

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.