Get started with Wekan, an open source kanban board

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way.

Here's the second of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019.

Wekan

Kanban boards are a mainstay of today's agile processes. And many of us (myself included) use them to organize not just our work but also our personal lives. I know several artists who use apps like Trello to keep track of their commision lists as well as what's in progress and what's complete.

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But these apps are often linked to a work account or a commercial service. Enter Wekan, an open source kanban board you can run locally or on the service of your choice. Wekan offers much of the same functionality as other Kanban apps, such as creating boards, lists, swimlanes, and cards, dragging and dropping between lists, assigning to users, labeling cards, and doing pretty much everything else you'd expect in a modern kanban board.

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The thing that distinguishes Wekan from most other kanban boards is the built-in rules. While most other boards support emailing updates, Wekan allows you to set up triggers when taking actions on cards, checklists, and labels.

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Wekan can then take actions like moving cards, updating labels, adding checklists, and sending emails.

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Setting up Wekan locally is a snap—literally. If your desktop supports Snapcraft applications, installing is as easy as:

sudo snap install wekan

It also supports Docker, which means installing on a server is reasonably straightforward on most servers and desktops.

Overall, if you want a nice kanban board that you can run yourself, Wekan has you covered.