Wondering What TODO

Tech Talk

I’ve been thinking of adding a Kanban board to my site for a more advanced TODO list. So far I’ve looked at:

  • Kanboard - Interesting and right now the main contender. It’s fast, easy to set up, and can use Postgres. It’s somewhat ugly, and the existing themes are few and far-between. It’s also PHP, which isn’t winning it any points. Also, every single theme breaks the code syntax highlighting in the hover tool-tip of the Board view. The fact nobody noticed this makes me wonder if the project is even still alive.

  • Wekan - Better look and feel, and more features. But it relies on MongoDB and appears to be a node.js project, and relies heavily on Sandstorm. It does have standalone, but that is packaged in Snap, and I’m not sure I want to encourage that. Nor am I convinced the public VM I’m leasing will be powerful enough for such a bloated stack.

  • Taiga - Looks to be the most advanced, and a Django app to boot, so it can use any compatible database backend. Unfortunately there’s been a ticket open since 2014 for swimlanes, and the feature is still missing. That’s basic functionality and they can’t get around to adding it.

  • Restya - Another PHP contender, and far more “pretty” than Kanboard. Unfortunately also no swim lanes. How do these devs have ample time for shiny glitz but not basic functionality?

All the rest I ran into were either paid apps or couldn’t be self-hosted. Perhaps someone out there knows a better alternative, but it looks like I’ll be tossing a Kanboard up for now. I can deal with the minor visual bugs for now, and it’ll be a huge step up from the Google Docs file I’ve been using.