Tasks Pro™ 1.7 alpha 1 is now available. I’ve had tagging completely implemented in Tasks Pro™ (in various incarnations) for about a month now, and I think it works pretty well.

Let me stress that this is an early development preview release. It almost certainly has some bugs, and could cause all sorts of problems for you. Make a backup before you upgrade. There is also no documentation yet for the tagging features that have been added. You’ve been warned. 🙂

Tagging is something many folks have been asking about and I’ve had it slated for this release for some time now. This also alleviates the need for Categories, at least in my mind. Having both a hierarchy and a tag-based metadata layer that crosses the hierarchy gives Tasks Pro™ users the best of both organization worlds.

I’ll give an example of how this feature is useful for us in the Tasks Pro™ install we use for managing FeedLounge.

We have several top level tasks (Bugs, Features, Documentation, Web Site, etc.), and often there are tasks in each of these task trees that we want to include in a specific release. With the new tagging feature, we can add a common tag (like ‘release-codename’) to each of these tasks. Then to see all of the tasks for ‘release-codename’ across all of the task hierarchies, we can just click on that tag.

All of you GTD folks should be thrilled about this too – you can now add your GTD tags to your tasks and use Tasks Pro™ as a full GTD system.

I’ve also implemented the font size feature I mentioned a little while back. The default size is now 11px (increased from 10px).

There are several more small features and one big feature still planned for version 1.7¹, but I wanted to go ahead and get a preview release out there so you folks can start playing with the tagging and sending in your feedback.

I’ve set up a forum thread to discuss the tagging feature, please join in the discussion.

If there is enough demand, I’ll try to get an alpha version of Tasks 2.7 with tagging out for feedback soon as well (before I continue adding the additional .7 features).

1. I’m considering pushing the big feature to a previously unplanned .8 release in order to get the .7 release out faster. [back]

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