217 - Get your WordPress tasks in order with DocketWP

Interview with Andre Gagnon, Kyle Van Deusen and Nathan Wrigley

Today we’re talking about the DocketWP WordPress plugin with Andre Gagnon and Kyle Van Deusen, the project founders.

So, what does it do and why might you want it?

It’s a plugin that provides you with an easy to access to-do list right inside of your WordPress dashboard.

Now this may not immediately seem like the most likely place for a to-do list. After all, I’m pretty sure that you’ve already explored a bunch of phone apps as well as desktop based solutions too. You may even have settled on the ‘perfect’ app that meets your every need.

But have you thought about the context of where the to-do list is? Have you thought that the place where it’s situated might offer some distinct advantages? Unless you’ve used DocketWP, I’d suggest that the answer to the previous two questions is no, well, I’m about to explain why you might want to.

So if you’re anything like me (and let’s be honest, you are, because you’re listening to a podcast all about WordPress) then you’ll spend a good deal of time inside of the WordPress admin area. This could be the admin area of your own site(s), or perhaps the sites of many clients.

If you’re not using DocketWP then your current to-do workflow means shifting between multiple apps, which is fine, but wouldn’t it be better if you had all the tasks right where you need them – inside the admin area?

Now, I’m going to grant you that DocketWP is not intended for the ‘get some milk’, ‘call the plumber’, and ‘walk the dog’ types of tasks. The tasks that you’re going to drop into DocketWP are going to work related. You’re going to drop tasks in there which you know are needed for this particular website.

Unexpected bonus, you get to decouple your personal task lists from the WordPress / work related tasks, which is actually nice when you want to separate work and your regular life.

I don’t know if this is something you’ve noticed, but my current to-do solution is a mess of personal and work related tasks and so at the weekend I always end up looking at work tasks, so never quite switch off. DocketWP offers you a nice line of insulation.

So in the podcast Andre and Kyle get into how this is different from a SaaS solution. How you interact with it in your WordPress admin area; the fact that it’s always available in the WordPress admin bar with a single click.

Now, I mentioned earlier about the fact that DocketWP is great at separating your work and personal tasks. Well, we’re not here to talk about the personal stuff, so let’s dive into the work related stuff. Why would you want a task list in your WordPress admin?

Here’s why… after you’ve built a bunch of sites, you settle into a pattern. You do things in a certain way. This theme gets installed, and these plugins and license keys get added in. Simple so far? But what about the multitude of little tasks that you carry on most websites, the little things that you sometimes forget! DocketWP allows you to save a bunch of task lists and save them in their cloud, so that the next time to start a new project, you just hit a button and the things that you need to do are right there, ready for you to action. Nice.

So the cloud based storage of the lists opens up a world of possibilities. Now you can share tasks with your team. So you’ve hired an intern and they need to be walked through the process of installing your boilerplate WordPress website… not anymore, just give them access to DocketWP and they’re away to the races.

Not that we’ve mentioned sharing, this brings up the fact that your entire team can collaborate on tasks lists so that you’re all on the same page all of the time.

Are you starting to get it now?

Okay, if that’s not enough, there’s one more really powerful feature that I want to mention. DocketWP enables you to download task lists from other experts so that you’ve got a head start on working through tasks that you’re not all that familiar with. So, here’s the list of task templates as of the time of writing…

• The Website Launch Checklist
• Maintenance Checklist
• The Blog Post Checklist
• Website Maintenance Checklist
• Website “Pre” Care Plan Evaluation
• SEO Any Web Page
• Onboarding an Outsourced Partner
• The Perfect Thank You Page
• Website Audit Checklist
• WordPress Performance

Some of these were created by the DocketWP team, but some were written by trusted third-parties who really know their stuff and who can give you a leg up in unfamiliar situations.

So, here’s a summary of what were dicusss:

• What does it do?
• What do you need this?
• How is it superior to a to-do SaaS apps like ToDoist?
• Where does it appear on your WordPress site? Can it be moved around to make it less invasive? Shrink / attach to the side etc.?
• How does the team aspect of the plugin work? Can we delegate tasks to others etc.?
• Does the data sync in real time back to DocketWP servers as a backup in case of a crash, or is it in the WordPress database?
• Pre built lists from your repo. – what are they?
  • Can we add our own lists to that repo. if we think that we’ve got a useful list?
• What’s the ‘Education Centre’ about?
• Pricing – Single / Team plans?
• Support – how does that work?
• Roadmap – what’s on it?

So checkout the podcast today to get the lowdown on this new and interesting WordPress plugin from DocketWP.

As always, if you’ve got any comments, post them on the WP Builds website, or over at the WP Builds Facebook Group.

Mentioned in this podcast:

DocketWP