Background

PlannerX allows rearranging / reordering items. Either using Tab / Shift / Indent / Unindent or via Drag & Drop. Everything works just perfect when you are creating a new plan. But when you worked with items in an existing plan, things started to break. Reordering to-do lists and to-do items was not much of a problem, since Basecamp APIs support that. But if you reordered milestones, that won’t stick since Basecamp always sorts them by due date again. Yet, the biggest issue is promoting or demoting an existing item.

Cause

When you convert a milestone into a to-do list or to-do item, we can create a new item for it. But what should we do with the milestone? We could just delete the milestone. But what if that milestone had comments? And attachments with those comments? If we deleted the milestone, comments would be deleted as well. And that would be bad.

Enter Zombies!

Zombies are defunct items (milestones or to-do items) that are still there in the system only because they have some comment. Their original item was moved around in a planning session with PlannerX. And since there are no Basecamp API to attach comments with another item, we had to keep old items hanging in with their comments. We mark them as [zombie], complete them and also add a new comment explaining their zombie status.

Can I remove zombies?

If you no longer need the comments / attachments associated with a zombie item, you can delete it. Deleting normal / zombie to-do items with time entries on them does not delete time entries though.

Is there no better way?

We thought a lot before coming to this solution. If you have a better solution, do let us know. We are all ready to improve.

I don’t like the word [zombie]!

We thought a lot about this too. We considered defunct, archived, removed, zombie and a few others. But felt zombie was the closest to our situation. Have another suggestion? Feel free to comment!

I still have problems.

We tested our code with many test cases. It should work well in most cases – though it may take slightly longer to save since we have to check for comments on almost every item. If you face any other issues, do report them with as many details as possible. We will try and fix them at the earliest!

What next?

Keep planning with PlannerX and let us know your feedback! Thank you!

We have got a number of requests to add OpenID support to PlannerX. I just tested it, and it works!

Here’s how you can try it:

• Make sure you have an OpenID profile. I use MyOpenID.
• Add a new user to your Basecamp account and give access to her for relevant projects (this is not necessary if you have users configured to use OpenID already)
• Log in to Basecamp using the new user. Go to “My Info” page. Switch to using OpenID with your OpenID URL.
• Save settings. This authenticates using OpenID and saves the settings.
• Once this is done, you will get a “Reveal my special username/password” link right below your OpenID URL.

Special Username / Password for OpenID

• Click on the link to reveal your special username and password.
• Now use this username, this special password, and your current Basecamp URL (e.g. something.projectpath.com) on PlannerX.
• You will be logged in and see your project list (or get straight to the project plan if you have only one project assigned).

What could go wrong? What should you check if you can’t login with OpenID?

Here are a few things to check if you can’t login using OpenID.

• Are you using your special OpenID username and password? Remember, it’s not your OpenID URL that you can use, you need to use the special username and password. The password will be some combination of characters and numbers.
• Are you using your correct Basecamp URL? Again, this is not your OpenID URL, but your Basecamp URL – it may look like yourcompany.basecamphq.com or yourcompany.projectpath.com
• Have you enabled OpenID access for this user? Confirm by logging in with that OpenID to your Basecamp project. Does it work?
• Do you have projects assigned to this user? If you have no projects assigned, you will get a “No projects found” message in PlannerX.
• Does OpenID login work with some other Basecamp Extra that uses Basecamp API?

Still not working? Let us know the details and we will investigate!

PlannerX – our latest product – allows you to plan your Basecamp projects about 5 times faster. It shows you an outline view of your project, helps you navigate quickly using keyboard and lets you edit the plan right in place. You can use shorthand for dates and assignees and save the entire plan in one go. (Gone are the days to keep clicking save / submit buttons!!).

Checkout this demo video. And if you use Basecamp, go ahead and take our free trial.