Copy, template, or choose project fields from other projects

[szeitlin]

I've made two projects so far with the new projects beta version, and each time I have to create all the fields manually, even though I want to use the same ones for my latest project.

It would be great if there could be a way to choose fields from other projects, or create templates for these.

[rebeccabrandt]

Yes pleeeeeease this 👆🏼 It's so frustrating having to recreate a project and all of the fields manually. I'd love to be able to save a project as default, or at least duplicate a project and have all of the fields move over too.

[alexcnichols]

One feature that's on the public roadmap is fields that are at the issue-level that could be used within any project. Although that doesn't directly hit on "project templates", it'd be interesting to see how that could be used instead or as well.

• Issue level custom metadata  github/roadmap#277

[rebeccabrandt]

@alexcnichols that actually would work very well for my workflow, and then the only field that would need to change would be the project/milestone. I like it!

Still, it's frustrating to have to recreate all of the various project views, considering our last project had around 10.

[GRobichaud]

Basically, the same copy feature as the old projects would work for me

[GRobichaud]

It ended up being unecessary for me. I used the old project boards for my 2 weeks sprints, closing the current board and spawning a new one every 2 weeks. So yeah, this used to be super important to just clone a board.

After exploring the new project board, I managed to get what I want from a single "rolling" board. The first step was to "close" a sprint by removing closed tickets. It turned out it's very simple, just archiving everything in my Done column:

Then, for loading fresh tickets, we just added a custom field for "Sprint", with values:

So my default "Sprint Board" is filtered on "sprint:"Current" with swimlanes on "Status". Whereas my "Planning" board is filtered on "-sprint:"Current", grouped by sprint. So I can see everything targeting the "Next" sprint and I can just switch then in one place. Again, much easier than before.

I also like the fact I can change that straight from witin the ticket.

So, basically, I do not need templates anymore 😄 . The remaining need maybe would be to have similar boards accross teams, but that's a much lesser concern. Leads all have their own preferences anyways...

[skipjack]

For historical/reporting purposes it seems a little dangerous to continue mutating older projects to repurpose them for new ones. I wonder if GitHub even exposes an audit log for projects through their API or UI. That's just the initial concern that comes to mind when reading your comment, but I see how this workaround would address much of the need.

[rebeccabrandt]

I totally agree with this @skipjack! Sounds scary to me. I often look back at old projects for reporting purposes.

[mbcann01]

Being able to create project templates would be really useful for me!

[mlcaraldi]

The ability to copy or duplicate a project would be really useful!

[brontevdh]

Hi 👋

Thanks for these posts 😄, we're keen to understand more about your top use cases for project templates. Please see a quick survey here. We'd love your input.

Thanks!

[rileybroughten]

Following up on this that templates for Projects are now in public beta! Check out the changelog announcement for more details! ✨