217 – Get your WordPress tasks in order with DocketWP

Interview with Andre Gagnon, Kyle Van Deusen and Nathan Wrigley

Today we’re talking about the DocketWP WordPress plugin with Andre Gagnon and Kyle Van Deusen, the project founders.

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So, what does it do and why might you want it?

It’s a plugin that provides you with an easy to access to-do list right inside of your WordPress dashboard.

Now this may not immediately seem like the most likely place for a to-do list. After all, I’m pretty sure that you’ve already explored a bunch of phone apps as well as desktop based solutions too. You may even have settled on the ‘perfect’ app that meets your every need.



But have you thought about the context of where the to-do list is? Have you thought that the place where it’s situated might offer some distinct advantages? Unless you’ve used DocketWP, I’d suggest that the answer to the previous two questions is no, well, I’m about to explain why you might want to.


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So if you’re anything like me (and let’s be honest, you are, because you’re listening to a podcast all about WordPress) then you’ll spend a good deal of time inside of the WordPress admin area. This could be the admin area of your own site(s), or perhaps the sites of many clients.

If you’re not using DocketWP then your current to-do workflow means shifting between multiple apps, which is fine, but wouldn’t it be better if you had all the tasks right where you need them – inside the admin area?

Now, I’m going to grant you that DocketWP is not intended for the ‘get some milk’, ‘call the plumber’, and ‘walk the dog’ types of tasks. The tasks that you’re going to drop into DocketWP are going to work related. You’re going to drop tasks in there which you know are needed for this particular website.

Unexpected bonus, you get to decouple your personal task lists from the WordPress / work related tasks, which is actually nice when you want to separate work and your regular life.

I don’t know if this is something you’ve noticed, but my current to-do solution is a mess of personal and work related tasks and so at the weekend I always end up looking at work tasks, so never quite switch off. DocketWP offers you a nice line of insulation.

So in the podcast Andre and Kyle get into how this is different from a SaaS solution. How you interact with it in your WordPress admin area; the fact that it’s always available in the WordPress admin bar with a single click.

Now, I mentioned earlier about the fact that DocketWP is great at separating your work and personal tasks. Well, we’re not here to talk about the personal stuff, so let’s dive into the work related stuff. Why would you want a task list in your WordPress admin?

Here’s why… after you’ve built a bunch of sites, you settle into a pattern. You do things in a certain way. This theme gets installed, and these plugins and license keys get added in. Simple so far? But what about the multitude of little tasks that you carry on most websites, the little things that you sometimes forget! DocketWP allows you to save a bunch of task lists and save them in their cloud, so that the next time to start a new project, you just hit a button and the things that you need to do are right there, ready for you to action. Nice.

So the cloud based storage of the lists opens up a world of possibilities. Now you can share tasks with your team. So you’ve hired an intern and they need to be walked through the process of installing your boilerplate WordPress website… not anymore, just give them access to DocketWP and they’re away to the races.

Not that we’ve mentioned sharing, this brings up the fact that your entire team can collaborate on tasks lists so that you’re all on the same page all of the time.

Are you starting to get it now?

Okay, if that’s not enough, there’s one more really powerful feature that I want to mention. DocketWP enables you to download task lists from other experts so that you’ve got a head start on working through tasks that you’re not all that familiar with. So, here’s the list of task templates as of the time of writing…

  • The Website Launch Checklist
  • Maintenance Checklist
  • The Blog Post Checklist
  • Website Maintenance Checklist
  • Website “Pre” Care Plan Evaluation
  • SEO Any Web Page
  • Onboarding an Outsourced Partner
  • The Perfect Thank You Page
  • Website Audit Checklist
  • WordPress Performance

Some of these were created by the DocketWP team, but some were written by trusted third-parties who really know their stuff and who can give you a leg up in unfamiliar situations.

So, here’s a summary of what were dicusss:

  • What does it do?
  • What do you need this?
  • How is it superior to a to-do SaaS apps like ToDoist?
  • Where does it appear on your WordPress site? Can it be moved around to make it less invasive? Shrink / attach to the side etc.?
  • How does the team aspect of the plugin work? Can we delegate tasks to others etc.?
  • Does the data sync in real time back to DocketWP servers as a backup in case of a crash, or is it in the WordPress database?
  • Pre built lists from your repo. – what are they?
    • Can we add our own lists to that repo. if we think that we’ve got a useful list?
  • What’s the ‘Education Centre’ about?
  • Pricing – Single / Team plans?
  • Support – how does that work?
  • Roadmap – what’s on it?

So checkout the podcast today to get the lowdown on this new and interesting WordPress plugin from DocketWP.

As always, if you’ve got any comments, post them on the WP Builds website, or over at the WP Builds Facebook Group.

Mentioned in this podcast:

DocketWP

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Transcript (if available)

These transcripts are created using software, so apologies if there are errors in them.

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Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your hosts, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, this is episode number 217. Entitled. Get your WordPress tasks in order with docket WP. It was published on Thursday, the 18th of February, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and a couple of housekeeping things before we begin, I would love it. If you subscribe to the content that we produce each week in the WordPress space, it's mainly audio and video, but you can do that by going to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe.
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You can do that [email protected] forward slash advertise a bit like AB split test have done. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything, and the best part it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the WordPress block editor.
You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. As I said, at the top of the show, episode two 17 is called get your WordPress tasks in order with docket WP. And today I'm happy to be interviewing on the podcast, Andre Gagnon and Kyle Van Deusen, who are the founders of docket WP? What is it?
Docket WP is a to-do list or a task lists, which stays in your WordPress admin area. Now, unlike a SaaS app, it allows you to do collaboration, but just on WordPress specific tasks. So you click the button, your tasks succinct to the cloud. That means that each and every time you start a WordPress install, you can have it.
A oven baked boiler plate set of tasks, ready to go. You can share them with your team and you can even download task lists from industry experts in areas like SEO and tasks for care plans. It's a really interesting product. It's the sort of thing that you might overlook unless you find out exactly how it works, what it's for and how useful and time-saving it can be.
I hope you enjoy the podcast. Hello there. Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. I am joined today by some very familiar faces. These people. If you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, you will know both of their names. They do very different things until very recently when they joined forces on the product that we're going to discuss today.
So I'd like to welcome them one at a time. Firstly, Kyle van Deusen from the Admin Bar. Hello.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:03:35] Hello, Nathan. It is awesome to be on here with you again.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:37] Yeah. Yeah. It really is very nice to have you. Thank you. And secondly, Andre Gagnon, I'm probably best known for project huddle. How are you doing Andre?
Andre Gagnon: [00:03:46] I'm great.
And you can still say my name, that's pretty impressive.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:51] I have actually said your name probably a hundred or more times during my podcast episodes in news bulletins and things. We we talk about project cuttable quite a lot. And so yeah I'm confident that I can get it right, but we're not here to talk about project huddle, although it does lend a certain credibility to the product that we are going to discuss.
When we talk about new products, Very often it's hard to gauge the backstory. It's hard to gauge whether you can trust something. And I think we can just put all of that on the shelf for now, because if you followed Andre's development in the past, you'll know about project model and the fact that it's been well-developed, well-maintained, well-supported updated all the time and so on and so forth.
So often I get into that whole, how can we trust you conversation, but I'm just going to skirt that. Or push that all to one side today, we're here to talk about WP docket or docket WP. Now I've written it down as WP docket, but on your website, I see it's docket WP. Is that right? Which way
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:04:48] is it? Which one do you thinks?
Your handwritten notes or our website?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:54] Don't kit. W you got it? Yeah. Okay. So first stop. What is it? Very basic question, but what is docket WP? Why would we want to have this plugin in our lives? Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:05:07] Really what docket WP is a more of a SAS solution. It's more of a software that has a WordPress plugin that allows you to connect into it.
And what you can do inside docket is quickly and easily create and manage lists. Specifically it's being used for process lists from right inside of your WordPress dashboard, where you can follow along. Doing things like a website launches or doing maintenance or optimizing blog posts. And you have a checklist that you can use right inside of your WordPress dashboard.
So you don't have to bounce back and forth. In the third party project management softwares, you can do it all in one place.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:43] Is it are you aiming this as a fairly stripped down version of project management? When you say those words, I'm immediately thinking of fairly complicated, heavy to use menus within menus and so on, difficult to learn structures.
I'm guessing this is something a bit different from everything I've seen on your website. You've just taken all of that Croft out and just kept it real simple.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:06:04] Yeah. I guess going into a little bit of the backstory of why this started or why we started working on this project would help explain that a little bit, but basically I have a love, hate relationship with project management tools.
I love them. I'm fascinated by them. I think they're really neat, but in the end, every project management tool I've picked up, I've ended up abandoning because I feel like I spend my entire day managing a project management tool which, when you're, when you have a solo agency like mine I don't have time to spend.
I don't have a project manager that can spend their day inside of a project management tool clicking a bunch of buttons and assigning thing. So part of the reason I started talking with Andre in the beginning about this project was just needing a really simple way to have some process checklists within my WordPress.
Admin dashboard that I can access from basically any install and with a click of a button, be able to pull those up and run through processes, make sure I'm not forgetting things or skipping things, but without having to jump back and forth. So it's not really a project management tool, per se, as in all the features you would find inside of a big project management tool.
But it does have some crossover with those things, because you can create, to do lists and things like that from, with inside the software.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:18] Okay. Okay. I want to stay on the, the human side of it and talk more about the interface and all that a little bit later. So you highlighted on the fact that it sounds to me like Kyle approached Andre maybe Andre take it from here.
What, how did the, how did it go? How did you two get in, get involved with one another,
Andre Gagnon: [00:07:35] I think I've known Kyle for quite a bit and we've just been internet buddies for awhile. But I think Kyle messaged me frustrated one day. That he forgot to uncheck disallowed search engines from one of his sites that he launched.
I don't know if you remember that Kyler, if that's true. Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:07:53] Don't tell
Andre Gagnon: [00:07:53] anybody
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:54] which
Andre Gagnon: [00:07:56] we've all done, stuff like that. Where I don't know it me when I was freelancing, especially you don't follow processes because it's just you and you think, Oh, I have it all in my head. I've been doing this for a decade.
I don't need to file a list and then you end up doing something dumb like that, that costs potentially a lot of money. When Kyle approached me with the idea of just making something super simple, that was for people that work in WordPress, you don't have to do any context switching in, open up a different app and learn how to use that.
It was just. All right in the interface. And you could keep track of things and make sure that you don't make those silly mistakes that, you still make even after a decade. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:35] it's about taking sort of standard operating procedures, things, which you do time and again, but I likely to forget one of the steps and putting it into some.
Maybe chronological order or something like that, so that you can tick them off one at a time, the usual stuff that you want to achieve in a website build, be that SEO related or perhaps related to, I dunno, actually building the WordPress website or doing the install or whatever it might be.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:08:58] Yeah, that's right.
That's absolutely it. Yeah, sorry. We have this jumping over each other problem when there's more of a song. So yeah, that's exactly it. We can within the system you can create basically a list library. So when you log into your account from any WordPress install, you have your library of lists you can pull in.
So if you had something for, launching a website or optimizing a blog post, whatever it may be. From any install you log in, you can pull on that list from your library create lists and save them to your library and things like that. You know exactly what you were saying on that point.
It's really was designed for having standard operating procedures in mind and being able to pull those in really easily without having to switch back and forth between different
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:38] apps. So the obvious question, which Andre has touched on, which I guess people are going to ask, or whether they're asking out loud or in their head is what's the difference between this say Ana and an Android app or a Mac based up that, that purports to do the same thing.
I'm a heavy user of to-do list. Or at least I have been in the past for some reason, it's gone off my radar a little bit and I check in with it a bit less but it does, I think, many of the same things. So aside from the fact that it's in WordPress, is there anything that it brings to the table that you think is.
Superior or different, or is that its main USP. The fact that it's all there, one click in WordPress where you're already sitting anyway.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:10:14] Yeah, for me, that, that was exactly why we started working on this project was to not have to switch them in between different programs. So I do have, I used to do as myself.
I know Andre uses it as well. In fact, he's the one that, that got me onto that. But part of this problem is. How much time you spend going back and forth between different things. So for me, like Andre was talking about you think I can do this. I've done this a hundred times and the excuses, I don't want to go open that up and pull up that app or pull up that website and go.
So it's that barrier. So you end up just doing things from memory because you don't want to take the extra steps. So we have, we are working on, obviously this plugin is young. We launched a few months ago, so we are working on different features that, that kind of make it.
More useful than just being inside the the WordPress install, things like being able to share lists with a single sign on system with your clients. So if you had a list of things you needed them to do if they have a WordPress you a user role or log in to their WordPress site, you can automatically share lists with them.
So one of the problems I've had working with clients is. It's really hard to try to teach them a, another project management system for getting a project done. So I just don't but with this, because it's a single sign on system basically you can tell them to just log in and click the button up in their admin bar and the list will be right there for them.
So we're working on some things like that to just make it more native to that experience where you're not having to get outside of that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:42] too much. Okay. Sorry, Andre. Please. Can I just.
Andre Gagnon: [00:11:46] Yeah, no problem. I think maybe going beyond that a little bit when you look at. Apps like to do lists or other project management tools.
There's like a Jack of all trades master of none. They do everything that you'd ever want them to do, but not really in a great way. I think one of the benefits of docket is when you pull up a new. Website for our client. You can load your list into it right away from your cloud library.
It makes it really easy to duplicate processes and go through them versus using something like a, to do this where you'd have to find a way to clone a list and which I'm not even sure it's possible. And make sure that it's, you're looking at the right list for the right website and you're not checking off the wrong list, the wrong project, and all sorts of messy things like that.
Just. Makes it simple. And so you don't have to think about project management, you can just get the job done. Do you know? That's interesting.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:35] I hadn't really drawn that analogy, but now that I think about it to do list is basically there for my entire life. Very little of which repeats itself, I'm just, I've got to take the trash out, that kind of stuff repeats itself, but all the take the car to the garage when it breaks down, that kind of stuff is just happening on a one-off basis.
Whereas this, it occurs to me is the kind of thing that you install and. A significant amount of what you're doing is exactly the same as the last time you did it. So it's a kind of rinse and repeat plugin that allows you to save away all those different little lists, put them somewhere. Whereas the to-do list Android up in my case is just about the stuff that I need to do and then delete it.
And it will probably never crop up again. It's about getting that gift for the person that you've got to get a gift for and blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay, so the next thing. On a podcast, very difficult to visualize what this actually looks like. But I think that's pretty important.
A lot of people listening to this, probably driving the car or something like that, want to paint a picture of how it works. I've seen the video. So I have a deep understanding of what it, how it works and so on. But I'm wondering if you can describe it maybe Kyle or Andre. I don't know which one wants to take this, but from the moment you've installed it.
How does it look? Where are the buttons? How does it, how does, how do you achieve things? Are you using a mouse you're using key strokes? It's is it something which is invasive? Can you get it out the way? Can you string it? Can you attach it? Can you make it pop up and disappear? All of that kind of stuff?
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:14:02] Why would I say Andre? You would be the main to answer this. You're the chief architect. Nice,
Andre Gagnon: [00:14:08] right? Oh, I am. Oh, I didn't even know that he's got the title right now. Yeah, I guess our whole philosophy with this is we don't want it to be intrusive. We want it to be out of the way, but always available.
So the moment you install it, the only thing you'll notice that's different is there's an extra button in your admin bar right next to your name in the upper right-hand corner. And if you ever need to access your list, it's all from that one button. So if you click that, it opens up like a pop-up.
That shows all of the tasks and all the lists and everything, all the interface right there. So it's not cluttering up the admin interface. And it's there in the front end, back end of the site. So you don't need to constantly go back to the backend to check off lists or anything like that.
And we also have some cool keystrokes too. If you're more tech savvy, you can click control. Backslash or command backslash, and that just makes it pop up and disappear. So you can get super fast if you want to. But of course everything's accessible through just using your mouse
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:07] Is then, is the, is it something that you can sort latch onto the side?
Like we might have with a page builder or something like that, where all of the controls are locked to the side and everything moves out the way. Can you do that kind of stuff? In other words, can you carry on working in WordPress whilst the to-do list is hovering over the top?
Andre Gagnon: [00:15:24] We don't. So we thought about this one for a while we thought, about possibly docking it. But I think the idea is we wanted to make it simple and non cluttery. We wanted to just make it as easy as possible to show and hide it, even with that short key or just clicking a button. So we don't have the ability to have it over the top of what you're doing.
So you can summon it in an instant when you want and dismiss it in an instant when you don't want it. And just through user feedback and us using it ourselves, we fall out that to be the best way to go about
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:55] it. Okay. So it pops up, you interact with it, you press the button again, and it disappears.
So how do you interact with it? Is it a, basically a text-based tool? Can you upload images if there's some of you wanted to show to a client, for example, can you screenshot things and dump those in? Or are we just ticking? Ticking things that are text-based and making them go into a Don column, if you like.
Andre Gagnon: [00:16:16] At its simplest level, it's a task management tool. So there's, when you open it up, you'll see. You can add new tasks and check them off just like you would on any other project management platform. But there's also you can add notes to tasks and it had all sorts of formatting and links and stuff.
So for an example, if you ha, if you share a list with a client and you want to add some more information about a task, you can even link to your own knowledge base articles or videos or whatever you'd want to do to provide more context. And then we, you can also I think Kyle mentioned this, you can assign people to lists you have a list library.
So it's the interface itself where we're not trying to do anything new. In fact, that was our, the opposite of what we wanted to do. We wanted to make it as familiar as possible so that people knew how to use it, the moment they opened it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:05] Okay. Got it. You mentioned kind of aspects of teamwork, or at least the relationship of.
Surfacing tasks to clients. How does that work? Can you, for example set up a task list and assign it to a particular user role or a particular user, is there a team capability in this? In other words, if there's I don't know, 12 people in my agency, we can all synchronize tasks with one another.
Any of those kinds of features or is it just like a solo individual solo preneur type plugin?
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:17:35] So we as far as adding people like collaborators to the list you can add anybody on an individual user basis if they have a account inside of that WordPress install. That could be a client or it could be a team member or a subcontractor.
So if you were bringing in, let's say a VA to help you with some things if they had a. Log-in on that website. You could assign tasks to them, regardless if they have an account with docket or anything like that. So it makes it fairly easy to be able to collaborate on those lists. Now, as far as like real team features, if you're talking about, a big agency we do have a lot of different thoughts on how all of this can be implemented.
And part of what we've tried to do this entire time is iterate on everything right. And get feedback and all this. And really what we found to this points so far is for real big agencies, or not even really big, but for bigger agencies, a lot of them have so many hard systems already in place with big project management tools that this doesn't seem like it's the right solution for them in all those cases.
So we're really finding where the people are having the most The most luck with this plugin and getting the most use out of it are just smaller agencies. So we haven't built in all those kinds of team features at this point. And going back to when we were talking about the interface and what it looks like and docking it and all these kinds of things, almost every conversation me and Andre have about a new feature is.
Him and I going back and forth for sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks on, how can we make this more simple? Like how can we make this stripped down to the point where it's just the essential part, because so many of those things are just like bells and whistles that get in the way of actually getting things done.
And there's a lot of project management systems where I've. I've stopped using them because I feel like I have to jump through too many hoops to just do what I need to. So a lot of this is really based around how can we do this as simple as possible. Got it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:33] Thank you. The I'm interested to know where the data resides.
That is to say, let's say that for reasons unknown to me, I might like to put some telephone numbers or email addresses into some of these to do things, call up. John and get his take on the SEO might be one in here. John's telephone number. Where's the data going. In other words, when I clicked save, I don't even know if I need to click save.
Let's say that I do. Where is it living? Because I noticed that you've got the capability of sinking things back to your cloud, such that if I start a new install, I can pre download all the lists that I might need for that particular WordPress install. Yeah, just a sort of privacy related question.
Really? Where's all this data going. Is it staying in the databases proportion of it going up to your server and so on.
Andre Gagnon: [00:20:16] Good question. That's I think Kyle and I are we really don't like cluttering up. A website database with non website things. So nothing is saved to your WordPress site, except for a project ID, just to keep track of that website, but there's no tasks or anything saved there.
All that stuff is stored securely on the Google cloud platform. So they're Google servers. So they're safe and secure and run redundantly backed up. That being said, though, we do have some features that allow you to work offline in case you're like, I dunno, in a subway or something, and you lose connection.
You can still work on your task lists, on a local install, let's say, and it will save some of these things in your browser and sync them later. Adding phone numbers and emails is perfectly fine, but I wouldn't suggest storing passwords or anything. No, I do mention that you probably shouldn't be doing that anyway in any app in clear text like that, but but yeah.
That's that's how it works under
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:11] the hood. So it is basically backing up synchronously it's happening as it, as I typed things in more or less immediately, that will be backed up. As an example, if I was sitting on this computer over here and I created a task list, I could go to that computer over there and on a completely different website, I could download it more or less instantaneously.

Kyle Van Deusen: [00:21:29] He got from one computer to the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:31] right.
Andre Gagnon: [00:21:33] It's pretty fast though. I dunno.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:35] Yeah. Yeah. I've got, you're very good at moving between chairs now. That's really interesting. So the, one of the things that I could see myself using this for is just breaking my workload up into little chunks. Like the SEO chunk.
Here's a, there's a bunch of stuff I want to do for SEO. Here's a bunch of stuff I want to do for setting up a website. And I noticed that you've taken that message really on board and you've actually got some. So my expertise outside of your, the two of you on board to, to make lists in advance so that you've got an SEO expert Pete Everett, and you've got some more things coming down the pipe.
Tell us about that. Cause that seems like a really nice project. In other words, if you get the plugin, you don't just get your own task list. So the capability to create lists, which frankly could be a bit boring and interesting. You could get an expert's take on SEO with presumably the click of a button.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:22:24] Yeah, exactly. So that was the thought process behind part of this was one of the reasons I think when you start thinking about processes, you realize how beneficial having things written down and a system assistant a systematized way of doing things can make you more profitable. It makes you make fewer mistakes.
It makes you be able to delegate things really effectively because you have. System for how all these things work. But where a lot of people, especially people who are newer to the business or or a lot of people who are just solo and work from memory, like many of us do is we're not sure where to start with those processes or we don't have the confidence to say, okay what I'm doing should be written down as the way to do it.
Whether, whether that's true or not. I think we all have a little bit of that imposter syndrome side of us too, so what we ended up doing was creating some prebuilt lists. Like you said, with your subscription, you get access to our official library, which has a bunch of done for you lists.
In there. And then the ability for you to create your own lists library as well. So you can create your own from scratch and save them to your library. But the official list that come with the subscription Those can all be brought in edited. You can save your own copy. I think that's really, the point is it's a starting point for you so you can go, okay these are all the things that are being recommended.
I do this a little bit differently, or I do this in a different order. You can make all those changes that you need, and then save that to your own library and be able to pull in your customized list on this. Yeah, we've created several lists ourselves that are in there inside of all of them, we give lots of documentation.
So if you were to. If you were to sign up for a trial and use our website launch checklist it would have, I think it's 28 different checks you need to go through in order to make sure your website's ready to be live on the internet. And each one of those steps has some notes in there that kind of gave you a brief explanation of what.
What this step means and link to entire articles that go, more in depth on how to do all these things. So we're really trying to give you some tools to be able to execute these things at a fairly efficient manner, too. But like you said, we've partnered up with people like Pete Everett or Brian Jackson Michael Killen go WP Christina Romero from WP care market quite a few different people that have provided some process checklist in their own area of expertise.
So you get to onboard that into your system pretty easily as well. Yeah, I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:43] think that's a really nice feature. Just icing on the cake stuff. It would be a great little. Login without that, but having that capability inside of it, it's really cool. The one thing about those pre-configured lists is if it if I created the list and handed it over to you, Carl, I can more or less guarantee that all of the shortcuts that I'd taken to write rubbish English, just because I understood it would be what would make it an insurmountable task for you to understand this?
So I'm guessing that. The Pete Everett list and the Christine and Romero list that they're more than just a list. It is some sort of explanation behind the steps inside the notes, perhaps something like that.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:25:22] Yeah, exactly. When you, like you said, it's hard when we're not visually looking at it, but inside of each you can have multiple lists inside your install inside of each list.
There's a really simple, like a check box and then the title of whatever that task is. But within each task you can add notes to it. Most of these. Lists that you'll get with your subscription inside the notes area, they will give you some more context as to what to do. So if for the launch checklist for instance, the first item in there is to set up your permalinks.
So if you click to expand that. First checklist item, you would see a note that says permalinks, determine how your URLs are structured. And then it has a link that says how to set up permalinks. And if you click on that, it'll take you to a blog post. That'll give you all the big explanation.
So the way it's structured is you can glance at all of these tasks. Titles. And for the most part, you'll probably know exactly what those mean. But if you, aren't sure about those things, you could go in and have that more context, which again is really good for if you're delegating things.
The first time somebody uses one of these lists, they might need to go in and look at all those notes to make sure they're doing it correctly. But as you reuse these lists over and over and optimize them and tweak them every time you get them to a point where they're serving as just your memory for making sure you don't forget anything with them.
Without having to dive into a bunch of context
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:43] on each one, the headline, yeah. Title is enough. You just tick it off the the products like to do this. And what have they have these pricing tiers and they stifled certain things that you can't do if you pay on this tier.
And if you have a, an additional tier, you can do extra things, that's just the SAS model. So that leads us nicely to pricing. How does it work? Are there any limitations on so for example, is there a free version? If yes how limited is that? If there's a paid version, how many tiers are there or is it just one price?
Everybody gets everything and whoever wants to take that one.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:27:15] It's our mantra with all of this and the UI and UX of the whole thing is to keep it really simple. That's basically what we've done with the pricing as well. We don't have a free a free plugin or a completely free subscription with stripped down features or anything.
It's pretty strictly a paid. Premium product. We do offer a free seven day trial. So you can go on the website and sign up there and have seven days to play with it and see if it's right for you or not. That will come with all the features. It just doesn't give you access to all of the pre-built list inside of there during your trial.
Just because. Some of the people we've partnered with and giving out some of that property before we have somebody on board is a little bit it's course. But the subscription is $68 for a year. There's only one single subscription level. So that gives you access to everything. In there, you can use it on as many websites as you want.
You can create as many lists as you want with as many tasks as you want and add as many collaborators as you want. So once you're in there, it's pretty much limitless what you can do with it, but it is pretty strictly a paid
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:18] for product. I'm going to get shot down in flames. The moment I say these words, but I don't think I've ever heard of a plugin that costs something ending in an eight.
That's really, it always ends in a nine. Why is it always a knowingness? A nine or a seven? Never an eight. That's a, that's an interesting price point 68.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:28:34] Pricing is very hard
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:35] to do. Yeah. Yeah. I'd go with eight, eight and a half K for 68.5. Anyway, moving on one of the things that. Always crops up, where is, okay, I'm going to invest in this.
I'm going to put all my notes in there. I'm banking on this thing being around for a long time. You don't have to answer too many questions about this. I don't want any financials or anything, but are you in this for the long haul? Is this a side project that you're both interested in for now?
Or do you have a roadmap that's essentially where this question's going?
Andre Gagnon: [00:29:03] Yeah, we do have a roadmap. And we are in for the long haul. We were not. Big corporations. So what we ended up doing, we put everything we have into. As far as our roadmap, one of the big things we do want to get accomplished is a dashboard.
So you can see all the tasks on all your websites, like from one interface. Nice. And we're currently working on that. I'm hoping we can beta test it soon. As far as toasting charges and stuff. That's something that, that's how we structure things. It's not going to be an issue.
It's kyle, do you want to maybe take this one? I'm not really sure,
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:29:40] but the question, for me neither one of us are going anywhere anytime soon. But for me, this is a tool that I got extremely invested in because I needed to use it. So I've built this into my agency and I'm running my agency off of these processes.
Andre has project huddle, which is a very successful, really well done software. I have things going on. So this isn't our full-time focus necessarily. But it's definitely something we're both invested in pouring time and effort into to make sure, we make it the best we can be, but it's definitely not anything.
We're looking at of turning away from anytime soon, especially since we're building our I'm building my agency into this as well. If
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:21] I'm like set at the top of the show, if you haven't heard of Kyle or Andre before, please do take a moment, go and look, visit the admin bar, which is, Kyle's kind of it's a bit like WP Builds in many ways, this podcast episodes, and there's a Facebook group and so on.
So you'll know. Did Kyle is embedded in the WordPress system and also just go to Google project huddle. Look at that. Look at the stunning set of updates, the beautiful UI, the great work that Andre's done and rest assured I'm sure the answers to those questions were tiredly entirely Meritorious right.
One final question, if that's all right. Because again, this is the sort of thing that crops up all the time. What if something were to w lacking understanding of something, if we installed a plugin and we're confused by how something works or something seems to be not working correctly and breaks down, how does the support work?
How can we reach out and be given an answer to a question we've got?
Andre Gagnon: [00:31:12] Yeah, we have a dedicated support, which is both me and Kyle. And one of the interesting things about doing something like this, cause I've done plugins and themes in the past is there's remarkably little support and I'm not sure if that's because how we built.
It was maybe just easier to figure out. And maybe the other part is that we're not relying on people's hosting. So I know if you're familiar with WordPress, right? You install a plugin on 20 different hosts. It's going to behave differently with ours, everything's in the cloud. So we don't have to worry about all those variables.
But, there's remarkably little support compared to other products I've done. And I think that's just a Testament to, Kyle's vision of trying to make it very simple and easy to use and, just making sure that we test everything really well. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:01] So have you got, like I noticed on the website, you've got like a chat.
Widget and soft. You've got to, presumably you're both in North America. So you're working I dunno Monday to Friday those kinds of times and answering the chat support when you've got some time available, we're not talking like three or four minute turnaround, but within a couple of business days, I think is what most people expect these days.
Something like that. Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:32:21] Full transparency. We use help scout and we're both logged in there pretty pretty regularly all day long. I get up early. So usually any question that I can answer the technical ones usually go to Andre, but usually those questions are answered at four or five in the morning, my local time.
Don't think anybody's had to wait a day or two for answers unless they wrote on the weekend, but inside the app itself, there's a little support button. You can click that. It automatically pulls up. The little help scout widget. So you can send a request in right there.
So it's pretty easy to request support. And Andre said, we just don't have a ton of it. Which is great. But yeah. All that is pretty easily taken care of. Like I said, if. If they're fairly simple questions, I'll usually try to grab them. But the, for the more technical stuff Andre has been the one that put all this together.
He knows a lot more than I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:05] do no, this feeling. I know this exact feeling. I'll tell you more about that later. So docket to wp.com. If you are keen to, I don't know, bring a task list inside of your WordPress install, synchronize those lists to the cloud. You can get yourself a free trial. There's a great big blue button says start free trial.
Did you say it was seven days? Yes. Yeah. Seven day free trial over there, and then $68 per year per installed with, by the sounds of it limitations completely stripped out. That sounds like a really great product. Thank you, Andre. Thank you, Carl. For joining us today, much appreciated. I hope that you enjoyed that.
It was lovely chatting to Andre and Kyle about their new project docket WP go to the WP, builds.com website and search for episode 217. And there are links in the show notes where you can actually find docket WP. It's an interesting product. It may be something, as I said at the top of the show that you haven't really thought about.
But the utility of it is really useful. The idea of having a to-do list just for WordPress tasks that you can sync with your team, download from the cloud, using different installs. And also the fact that you can have tasks lists from industry experts in areas that you may not be an expert in yourself, really a useful tool and go and check it out.
It's nice to see these two guys collaborating the WP build's podcast is brought to you today by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? The new AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else.
Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. We will be back next week. I'll be having a discussion episode because each week we flip flop between a discussion episode and an interview episode.
And as today was an interview, next week will be a discussion they're always done with my good friend, David Wamsley. We're going through the eighties ad or a to Z of WordPress. And we're fairly early on to this plenty more left in that series. It's published at 1:00 PM UK time. Really you can avoid all that nonsense by just heading over to your favorite podcast player and subscribing search for WP Builds.
If you can't find it, go to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe, and there are links on those pages as well. Also at 2:00 PM UK time on a Monday, we do our, this week in WordPress live news. I'm joined next week by Paul Lacey. And we discuss with some notable WordPress guests, all of the different things that have been happening in the WordPress space that can be [email protected] forward slash live or in our Facebook group.
Okay. I hope you have a good week. Stay safe. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, bye-bye for now.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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