As you may or may not have noticed, Squish was recently upgraded to version 5.1. If you want to see a full list of what’s new and what’s changed, take a look at the release notes. But I’d like to focus on a couple new things surrounding the core of this update: project management.

Chances are, when the update went out, you didn’t notice any of the new project management features. That’s because they’re entirely opt-in. If you’re a project manager, you’ll notice a new group of settings in your project admin:

At the heart of project management are three basic concepts: projects, tasks, and due dates. You can view this as a hierarchy:

• Projects (e.g. a wedding, a software version release, etc)
• Tasks that apply to each project (e.g. Flowers, Transportation, etc. in the case of weddings)
• Issues assigned to a project and task that may or may not have an explicit due date.

There are due dates at every level of this hierarchy, and they “trickle down”. So while the Flowers task may not have an explicit due date, the Jones-Smith Wedding most certainly does, so issues with this wedding and task have a due date, whether they explicitly specify one or not. But what good are due dates without…

The Calendar

The Calendar page is the hub of the new project management features in Squish. From here, you can:

• Filter the issues and tasks you want to see by project, task, and date range.
• View a chronological listing of upcoming issues and tasks. This view will also display issues that do not explicitly have a due date set, but are “due” by means of being assigned to a project or task that is due.
• Easily create a new project or task.
• Click on a particular day to enter an issue to be due that day.

Reminders

In addition, Squish now has a reminder system that sends out emails for issues whose due dates are approaching. The reminders are sent to whoever the issue is assigned to. To make this more useful, we’ve made it possible for issues to be assigned to groups of people. This also allows groups of people to be notified on changes to issues.

Project Details

New to version 5.1 is a detailed project information page. In addition to showing issue breakdowns by status, this page displays due dates, notes associated with the project, and a Gantt chart of issues by task, with clickable links to display the associated issues.

That covers the basics of project management. If you want to try out some of these features without altering your existing projects, feel free to use the demo site. And as always, feedback is welcome via our support page.