2019-01-30 Hi, guys! As promised in the previous post, we’ve finished the first version of the dashboard, which is now available for all team members, and implemented a wide range of permissions settings accessible from the admin panel for the company administrator and managers. Thus, this version was fully focused on keeping the whole team abreast of all updates in the projects and providing them control over what is happening next door if necessary. Some other changes have mainly affected bug fixing and layout improvements.

Dashboard: track all updates throughout projects

The initial version of the dashboard is the place where all team members, both developers and managers, can track the latest updates in the project. It is available in the development mode for each project and project group which you have access to. To open the dashboard, click on the Riter logo while being on any page of a project or a project group.

The dashboard content is similar to the history of changes displaying on story pages when somebody updates a story or writes a comment to it. However, the dashboard includes changes of all tasks in the current project. Some other updates related to the project in general, not particular task (for example, adding working hours), are shown in the dashboard as well. Thus, you can quickly look through all the latest events in the project and use links inside the dashboard notes to get directly to the updated stories which you are interested in.

We’re sure that the dashboard will be improved in the future Riter releases. For example, we’re going to let you get notifications from the dashboard, filter events by different criteria, etc. Let us know which features you would like to see there so that we could make Riter better.

Updated admin panel

We have significantly improved the admin panel, though its main functionality has remained almost unchanged. You can still add users, customers, projects, and project groups there, track working hours and other statistics on projects progress, grant your teams access to particular projects, and manage project settings which were available before. However, we’ve improved interface and navigation throughout the admin panel.

We have also added some new informative pages. For example, the “States” tab on a particular project page tells you how story states can be changed. In the nearest future we’ll make it possible for managers to add their own story states and specify the order of their changing. We’ve also added a set of the most important notes and tips inside the admin panel to tell you more about Riter capabilities. However, the most detailed information can be always found in the documentation. Some unnecessary pages were, on the contrary, removed. For example, the “Sprints” tab turned out to be useless since all data about sprints is available in the development mode, in the project settings, where sprints can also be created and managed by the whole team.

New permissions settings

As ardent followers of the “teal workflow”, we believe that the team which you hire for a project, must be independent and responsible enough to work on their tasks without extra control and restrictions. Also, we’re sure that in most cases it’s better to keep all project data available to everyone and organize the workflow with general awareness.

However, no matter how you trust your team, it is sometimes necessary to restrict access to some project data or features of your project management tool, at least, for the sake of general convenience. For example, to avoid misunderstandings and errors from developers with less experience. Or to hide information from users that they absolutely do not need and which will only distract them from important things. Riter should remain simple and show everybody only the data they really want to see there.

To this end, we’ve added the ability to specify permissions of users for each particular project. In the admin panel, open any project and switch to the “Users” tab. Here you can see all users (both developers and managers) assigned to the project (if not, you need to add them first using the “Assign a user” button on this page). Click on the “Permissions” button on the right of a particular user to manage their rights. Then you’ll see a list of all existing permissions which are enabled by default. You can restrict some rights of the user if you need and enable them back later when necessary. Make sure that your team knows about the restrictions added so that they won’t be confused by some features disappeared suddenly.

Other small changes

We’ve also fixed bugs and made other small changes, some of them are:

• Fix dropdown menu of projects
• Allow pagination of topics and users in a story in GraphQL

Let us know what you think of the new Riter version — you can leave your feedback here.

Riter development team