Is it possible to have a Kanban view based on a custom field?
Asked by Jason Isbister:

Hello to the Trello community!

I am new to Trello. I am trying out the Business Class free trial.

**My question**: If I create a custom field, can I create a kanban view that will sort my cards and tasks according to the values i choose in the custom field?

Please let me know if you need more details.

Thank you in advance - Jason


Answers:
author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Jason Isbister](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3959423) there's only one kanban view as such in Trello (board has lists, lists have cards) but you can sort lists by custom field using Butler.

What's the use case? Maybe I can provide a better answer with a little more detail on how you plan to use it.

comments: author: Jason Isbister
body: Hi Iain,

Thank you very much for taking a moment to read through my issue.

We support advertisement placements for a grocery store. They offer 40+ placement options as "week ending on". These placements run from Thursdays thru to the following Wednesday.

So, we manage our projects and/or sub-tasks as "WEO" (week ending on). Example; this week would have been WEO june 10. Next week will be WEO june 17, so on and so forth.

I would like to create a custom field with all the yearly WEOs, and, when we need to see a view by WEOs, be able to sort my Kanban list in that way.

I hope this gives you more context. If not, I'd be more than happy to schedule some time to speak voice to voice over a Zoom session or something.

Thank you again, Iain. Can't wait to see what you have to share.

PS: where can I read up on how the "Butler" feature could help with the Kanban lists?

Thanks - Jason


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Jason Isbister](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3959423) Hmmm it almost seems to me like it would make more sense to have your WEOs as lists rather than fields. Then each grocery store's placements for a particular WEO are in the relevant list, maybe the title of the card is the grocery store or if each store has multiple placements available per week, you could create names by location (?? not really sure of the specifics) and use a label to designate each placement as related to a particular store, allowing you to filter the board to show only placements relevant to that store.

Then maybe at the end of each week, you move the left most list on the board (the week just past) into a "Placement History" board in position 1. So your placements board has lists in ascending order stretching out to the right with the current week furthest to the left, and your history board has lists stretching in descending order out to the right with the most recent week furthest to the left.


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Jason Isbister](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3959423) BTW you can read more about Butler here:

<https://help.trello.com/article/1198-an-intro-to-butler>


author: Jason Isbister
body: Hello Iain,

Hope you are well. Thank you for your reply, and sorry for my tardy follow up.

Well, that's what I'm hoping I will be able to do, is flip-flop the list view;

* list few by project status
* list few by WEOs

Maybe one important detail, currently, we only have one grocery store chain. As others are added, we're going to put them on a sperate Trello board. We would not put several stores on the same board....way too confusing.

The title of the card is; NameBrand - ContractNumber (ex: Coke - (JI-9999)).

What seemed the most promising is the Butler option. I tried creating a Board Button rule (sort the cards in list "To Do" by custom field "SF weeks" ascending), but that didn't seem to do the trick.

It's not changing the type of list to WEOs. It's only sorting within the existing list, by WEOs.

So, i don't know if you can share any more wisdom on my business problem. I'll take all the help you can share.

And thank you for the link to the Butler help page. I will go through it.

Best regards, Jason


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Jason Isbister](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3959423) what are some examples of project status? What are you currently using lists for?

Also note that if you decide to have one board per grocery store, you'll be back here in a couple of months saying "how can I synch all my cards back to a single overview board?"

You're almost certainly better off having everything in one board and using labels to filter them:

<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/How-can-I-see-all-my-Trello-cards-in-one-place/ba-p/1050430>


author: Jason Isbister
body: Hello Iain,

Our lists are made out of the following status (for your benefit, I've translated them to English, as they are in French)

There are currently 9 status;

1. Request to be validated
2. Booking to be validated
3. Validated by marketing
4. To be added to calendar
5. Material production
6. In production
7. Completed - to be analyzed
8. Postponed/Canceled
9. Completed

Thanks Iain,

Jason


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@Jason Isbister](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3959423) Okay, I think that you would actually be better off using labels for those states, and lists for your WEOs.

Because the number of states is finite, and maintaining a dynamic list of labels is much more cumbersome than managing a dynamic list of lists.

You can still use board filtering to show cards in one or more states for a given WEO.

Alternatively you could keep your states as lists, and use due dates to indicate WEO which would also allow you to apply a filter to the board to show cards for a given WEO value, this isn't possible using a date custom field though.


author: Jason Isbister
body: Hello Iain - ok, that seems like an interesting alternative. I'll have to setup a test to see how that works in "real life".

Once i'll have laid the test out, I'll let you know what the outcome is.

Thank you again, Iain. You've been very generous with your time!

Jason