I’m enjoying spending time coding new features again. I’ve already added several new features for the next release of Tasks Pro™:

• The first one I implemented was one of the most commonly requested: a preference to let new tasks inherit their groups from their parent task. This is rather trivial when you’re creating a sub-task by clicking on the new sub-task icon, but it gets a little trickier when you set or change the parent of a task from the edit form. To solve that problem, I implemented a JavaScript alert that fires when the parent value has changed and asks if you’d like to use the groups of the new parent for this task. If the user answers yes, then it retrieves those groups and sets them accordingly. I hope this will placate please the people that have been asking for this.
• Another small feature is the addition of an ‘E-mail Reminders Password’ in the Server Settings. This can be embedded in the URL for CRON jobs, etc. so you don’t need to include a valid username/password combination in the command run by your CRON job.
• I’ve also done quite a bit of work on the admin interface. The landing page is gone and has been replaced with a tab bar across the top of the screen. This lets you quickly jump between screens without the extra click of going to the landing page.
• I added a Permissions screen in the Admin pages. It shows a table of users and permissions with checkboxes for each. This allows you to distribute and retract permissions a lot faster than the previous method of editing each user individually. I also added a ‘disabled’ flag so that you can disable and enable users as needed en masse.

It’s fun knocking off all these little details, but the bigger changes for this release are still on the horizon. I’m also holding back a little on the big features because I want to finish reading the database book before I make too many changes to the database to support the new features.

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