[Projects] Feedback on GitHub projects Beta Side-Panel

[omerbensaadon]

This is a feedback Discussion for users of the GitHub Projects Side-Panel

Leave your feature requests below!

[abhimskywalker]

@omerbensaadon how to enable/access this in my github project? 🤔
I was about to comment that iPad like side-Panel for issue navigation feels very nice and would make Github Projects experience almost like any of the modern project management tools like asana, etc. 🚀
PS: If this is not what I am talking about, apologies in advance 😅

[omerbensaadon]

Going to enable this as a Feature Preview early this week, sorry for the delay!

[abhimskywalker]

Works nicely.
I guess non-issue tasks will also become first class citizens with this :)
Timeline is the only thing missing, but description and comments from kanban style view is great.

Feedback/UX-break:
👉 From List view when i click on issues they take me to new tab with issue page, but non-issue tasks open in the side-panel. Perhaps a uniform experience for side-panel opening on all clicks would be nice to have here

[vpriya]

looks nice

[mvstepanek]

I like that feature. Unfortunately, for now, it's not working with the Grammarly extension. If I want to correct something, I get a popup with You have unsaved changes. Press cancel to continue editing..

[thibaudcolas]

It works exactly as I would have expected it to. With this in place, it feels much more practical to stay within projects’ Kanban-style Board view, rather than having to switch back to Table view whenever we have to make edits.

[vojtech-dobes]

In my opinion this is spot on implementation 🎆, works exactly as I would like it to. 💯

Just slightly related thing (that I've encountered already at regular GitHub issue detail page) is that showing all fields by default for a project would be much more ergonomic than having to display them with extra click. Especially if issue is part of a single project only (our case in 99% of issues).

[omerbensaadon]

thanks for your feedback! Development on the side-panel will resume in a few weeks once we've had the opportunity to collect feedback 👀 will keep this in mind

[dmackerman]

Yes, this is a major annoyance for our team because we have 7+ fields that we're tracking!

[ShadowOfLukey]

I also did post about this, but saw this late. Thanks for also sharing this. Really appreciate it and I also think that the side panel should be displaying more consistently - a lot like the status field instead of displaying them differently and taking up more room:

[ReedOnly]

I had this feature yesterday, however today GitHub Projects opens a new tab instead of the side panel when clicking an issue. How can it be re-enabled? It worked wonderful for the few hours I had it! 🥳

[omerbensaadon]

Strange... Do you have it enabled in Feature Preview? https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/using-github/exploring-early-access-releases-with-feature-preview

[ReedOnly]

Now it works!! thanks so much 😍

[ch1bo]

Works perfectly for us, thanks!

One minor follow-up maybe: the "convert checkbox to subtask" feature would be great to have from the side-bar! Ideally with creating sub-task issue and directly adding it to the same project.

[omerbensaadon]

thanks for your feedback! Development on the side-panel will resume in a few weeks once we've had the opportunity to collect feedback 👀 will keep this in mind

[Kucharssim]

I love the side panel feature!

It would be great if there was an option to transfer/add an issue to a different project from the side panel. I did not find how to do that while staying in the current project page. So I assume that currently it's only possible by opening the issue in a new tab and reassign the issue to a different project from there.

[omerbensaadon]

thanks for your feedback! Development on the side-panel will resume in a few weeks once we've had the opportunity to collect feedback 👀 will keep this in mind

[samwyness-district]

Love the new side panel feature, well done GitHub team 👏 🚀

[omerbensaadon]

This totally exists in the table view!

Just enable it and click any row

[samwyness-district]

It sure does! Thanks @omerbensaadon.
It wasn't working for me on the day the feature was released, even with the feature preview enabled.

[Fanweilin1]

nice！

[samwyness-district]

A really handy feature of issues is the 'Development' section on the issue page. Creating a branch via the issue directly is something we do in our project as a preferred practice (e.g. feature/1234-create-an-awesome-side-panel) as we often reference the issue number in discussions.

Enabling this feature in the Issue Side-Panel would allow us to use the Side-Panel for almost all of our efforts when managing an issue from the Project board 👌

[samwyness-district]

Discussion: #16131

[askpt]

I agree with you! We should be able to quickly create branches from the new view. It's a great productivity feature!

[omerbensaadon]

thanks for your feedback! Development on the side-panel will resume in a few weeks once we've had the opportunity to collect feedback 👀 will keep this in mind

[zakaryarashak]

16131

[cory-baker]

@omerbensaadon Are you able to confirm if this is apart of current development?

[kithrup]

I also love how, even though it's disabled, it's still there.

[omerbensaadon]

hopefully this is resolved?

[jessmartin]

I'd really like to be able to deeplink to specific "Draft" Issues. I would think a simple implementation would be adjusting the URL when the sidebar slides out. i.e., https://github.com/orgs/YourOrg/projects/17/views/1/drafts/1

But I suspect the deeper issue is that these Draft-not-quite-Issues don't actually have publicly-visible IDs the way that Issues do! 😢

In any case, I need to be able to pass a URL to someone and say "please look at this Draft issue" and that's currently not possible, unless I'm missing something.

[omerbensaadon]

Deep linking is definitely something we want to look at in the long-run, got a few other loose ends to tie up but I would expect this out of the product eventually

[drewvanstone]

We're running into this issue as well. We don't want to pollute the repo's Issues with subtasks, so we use draft issues. It would be very helpful to be able to link to these draft issues.

[vbalazs]

I think this is relevant also for issues, not only drafts.
It already happened several times in our team that they open an issue on the Side-Panel view, then copy-paste the URL and send it as a reference to the issue which is currently just a link to the view and not the card/issue.

[mattcosta7]

https://github.blog/changelog/2023-01-05-github-issues-january-5th-update/

We recently shipped urls that link directly to the projects sidepanel open to an issue or draft issue

[Vistaus]

Hmm, I enabled this in Feature Preview, but I don't see it. Is this an A/B test or something?

[MithrilMan]

because it has been poorly explained how to enable and use it...

First you need to have a Project(beta) in any of your repository

Select your (beta) project

Then select any of your issue

A panel will show up on the right, instead of a new browser tab with your clicked issue

[MithrilMan]

In case you were already on the project page, you need to refresh the browser

[PrayagS]

Thanks for sharing this @MithrilMan. I think the GH team should update the note at the feature preview page with these instructions.

[jeffstedt]

+1

The feature preview description was very poor and I basically had to find my way here and read this comment to understand the new alpha feature.

[omerbensaadon]

Thanks for the feedback folks, we've enabled this by default globally but will certainly take this as feedback for myself to do a bette job writing these descriptions 😅

[yegeniy]

Fantastic idea. Please add the same kind of preview for PRs (even if only the "Conversation" tab) and it's a win!

[garrettm]

Agreed, having this on PRs would be really useful. Right now I am still a bit scared to click without thinking because sometimes it will be a PR and open a new tab.

[nul800sebastiaan]

Aha! That's why it wasn't working for me, it's only for issues, PRs still open in a new tab. I actually use project boards mostly for PRs so this feature is unfortunately not very useful for me yet. +1 for PR sidepanels!

[omerbensaadon]

thanks for your feedback! Development on the side-panel will resume in a few weeks once we've had the opportunity to collect feedback 👀 will keep this in mind

PRs are probably a bit behind other changes and optimizations we're hoping to make, but rest assured we've got them in mind

[MithrilMan]

Definitively needed, thanks.

[fabiangeisler]

Love the feature! 🙂
Is there a hotkey to open it from board or kanban views? I could not find one. Would be nice to move around the issues with the arrow keys and toggle the panel on or off as needed.

[iansan5653]

Hi @fabiangeisler - to open the side panel from board view, you can press Enter while focused on an item title.

[fabiangeisler]

Thanks @iansan5653 !
That does work, but is a bit cumbersome to get to. If you are only using the keyboard you have to hit tab quite a few times to get there. Would be great to have a short cut that opens the issue while any part of it is selected. Also after closing the panel, the selection is lost, which makes it hard to go through the board view fluently.
Anyway, thanks for your hard work on this! 🙂

[fabiangeisler]

Just saw the release notes and that you added support to press spacebar for opening the issue site panel! This is great! Thank you! 😄 One minor additional request: Can we enable this behaviour for the kanban views as well?

[qwc]

Hmm, this reminds me of JIRA boards and the opening of any issue on the right side.

That's a great thing, but guys, please be consistent and offer to open all issue types, PRs etc. in this side view, then the users do not have to switch tabs in their browser. At least I would like this a lot. :)

[omerbensaadon]

PRs is a top request! We hear you :)

[Descent098]

One other thing that would be nice to have is to be able to specify a few markdown-styles to the title of an issue/note. Specifically being able to bold, italicize and set inline code blocks would be handy since sometimes titles will include names of functions like the example below and delineating it would be handy:

[omerbensaadon]

I've opened an issue for this! Thank you

[ShadowOfLukey]

It would also be good to change the background colour of the status and any other added fields to make certain items in fields more noticeable on the projects list.

[ShadowOfLukey]

When viewing a project by milestone, any issues that are in the No Milestone category are not getting sorted say if you were to sort by ascending / descending on a custom added field. They are only sorting for the issues with a milestone assigned.

[eddiezane]

This PR crashes Chrome for me with the new side-panel enabled and opened. When it doesn't, clicking on filenames does.

kubernetes/kubernetes#109111

[iansan5653]

Hi @eddiezane, thanks for the report. This is not related to Projects Beta, but I'll forward this to the Pull Requests team.

[iansan5653]

This should be fixed now! Please file a bug report if you still see this issue.

[ivanmayes]

This issue may be a bit tangential to this thread, but there is an issue when trying to assign outside collaborators in the Projects side panel. Whether it is in a draft or issue state, I can't find certain outside collaborators, even though they are added to this repo and to the project.

Once I go to the issue page I can successfully add the outside collaborators.

This is within a Github Organization with SSO, not sure exactly what types of permission settings are flagged but that may have something to do with it.

[filip-stefanov]

Same issue here. So I used to refresh the browser and assign the issue to outside collaborators. After creating the issue, you should refresh the browser to assign the issue to the outside collaborators.
But that should be a bug for this feature. I am really bothering with assigning the issue to the team members. Hope this bug would be fixed asap. :) @omerbensaadon @ivanmayes

[omerbensaadon]

I'll open an issue to investigate this! Thanks for your feedback :)

[danemacmillan]

When an open side panel shows an issue from a repository, all of the commits that reference that issue should appear. Currently, opening a side panel in a project means I always need to click on the link to open the issue in a new tab to see the actual commit progress against the issue. I can only assume this is eventually being added, but if this was an oversight, it's worth mentioning how important those commit references are within an issue. Ultimately, I would expect everything from a fully-opened repository issue to be available in the project side panel.

[omerbensaadon]

We plan to implement this eventually but I don't have a timeline for ya.

We hear you!

[nicola-whyte]

We've just moved to using projects as our main sprint board and we're pretty keen on this too please.

[ADTC]

@nicola-whyte IMHO GitHub Projects isn't designed with sprints in mind. We actually moved to Jira because we want to do sprints and GH Projects just wasn't working well to run our sprints effectively.

Jira has a lot of sprint-specific features and other powerful features like workflows and automation, none of them exist in GH Projects, which is just a very simple multi-repo issue tracker. The workflow/automation in GH is very simple and highly opinionated, not extremely flexible like the one in Jira. GH doesn't have any kind of story point tracking and we had to use labels for it which can only be filtered, while in Jira, story points is a first-class feature and it's used for velocity computation and report generation.

It's a shame, really, as I wanted to keep using GitHub Projects, but our needs greatly overgrew its capabilities.

Bonus tip: Jira has a free version, and it has dark mode in beta now.

[MiracleXYZ]

Embedding GeoJSON maps in issue comments causes infinite loading.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open an issue and link it to the project.
2. Create a comment under the issue.
3. Embed the toy example of GeoJSON here.
4. Open the issue on projects Side-Panel.

Note that only GeoJSON in comments causes this problem - embedding in the issue itself works fine.

[omerbensaadon]

I'll open an issue to investigate, thanks for your feedback!

[hussam-i-am]

Hi! Do you still see this issue? I just tested it out and it looks to be working for me now

[shiftkey]

👋 @MiracleXYZ I've not been able to reproduce this either with the sample GeoJSON file - is there extra details that you can share to help us reproduce what you're seeing?

[Metrol]

I've tried moving our work flow on over to projects. We've been using milestones to track at what stage of development an issue is in. Not really thrilled with using milestones in this way, but it has distinct advantages over the project view.

For example, we have one milestone for QA Review. Here, I can see all issues awaiting QA approval across any number of projects. This is true of other milestones we use just for tracking. Like seeing every issue in Development. Having to drill down into individual projects doesn't provide what we need from a management perspective.

Moving an issue between milestones shows who did what and when. From what I've seen, there is zero tracking on who did what on the project view.

• Who added an issue to the project? When?
• Who moved an issue to a different status? When?
• Can I notify people when an issue has moved to a specific status?

Every non-critical issue we have goes through the same basic workflow. When I create a project, I would want to be able to define for my organization a template that would always be used. A minor point compared to my first two.

Perhaps it's a beta thing, but I don't understand by every project is scoped at the organization level only. I would want to be able to open a project that only gets worked on from within a specific repository. When working within a repo, I really don't want to be presented with every unrelated repo in the org. At the org level, it would also be helpful to know which repo the project is connected to.

My intention here is to provide what I hope is helpful criticism. I really like the visual presentation for the project view. I would love to move our workflow to utilize it. Thing is, as awkward as using milestones for workflow may be, we'll be going back to that for now. At least until something changes with my primary concerns.

• Ability to list all the issues for a given project status across multiple projects.
• Record who made status changes, and when were they made.
• Notification lists for each status in a project.
• Template a new project workflow.
• Project scoping to Org or Repo level.

[omerbensaadon]

Hey this is great feedback, I enjoyed reading it, but it is in the wrong place

I would see if any of your requests exist in https://github.com/orgs/github-community/discussions/categories/issues and give those a +1, if not, opening a new discussion in the "Issues" category would be helpful for others to find it.

Thanks for taking the time to write all that out!

[VladimirAlexiev]

@omerbensaadon and @Metrol I posted https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/44406 which is a slightly related question.

[cory-baker]

I'd like the ability to add a label to an item without converting to an issue. As a project manager, I have no clue if the ticket is linked to the API or Web repo. And therefore would like to assign a label without having to create an issue in a repo first

[martinsifra]

Text fields with URL's are not clickable links.

When you ad text field where you want to store URL, it's underlined as URL but when you click it, you start editing the field.

[omerbensaadon]

Hey actually you can do this with HTML, bit of a hidden feature: click me

Very sorry its taken me this long to respond, but it technically isn't relevant to this feature

[janpieterz]

It'd be awesome if the url could be rewritten when opening an issue into a side panel to deep-link to that issue, rather than that the url stays on the view. Fighting the muscle memory to just copy the url from the browser is hard.

[omerbensaadon]

We've heard this feedback before! It's on a long list of tech-debt to resolve but we want to move in this direction

[mschile]

When I add a label from the issue side-panel, the labeled event doesn't show up in the issue timeline both in the UI and from the timeline API. Am I missing something?

Example, Needs Reproduction label on cypress-io/cypress#23607

[omerbensaadon]

Hmm... it should?

[mschile]

@omerbensaadon, it looks like #30817 was also logged for the issue.

[omerbensaadon]

ooo good callout... I'll be sure to submit this bug

[omerbensaadon]

This thread is no longer monitored by PM

Hey folks, this has actually shipped globally for quite awhile, and the feedback on this Discussion is starting to just be general feedback for Projects. Please put feedback for Projects under "Issues" here: https://github.com/community/community/discussions/new?category=issues

[ADTC]

How do I move from issue to issue in the side panel? I find that I have to close the side panel and open it again for the next issue. It's inconvenient. There should be some arrow buttons (for mouse) or keyboard shortcuts like left/right arrows to just load the previous/next issue in the list inside the open side panel.