Advanced Actions

We’ve already covered a lot of ground and you are hopefully feeling extremely inspired by how much you can do in Trello. But for some workflows, you’ll need to use even more than basic automation actions. For instance, maybe you can’t find an action that suits what you need for counting how many cards have been through a workflow, or you need to find a similar card and make an update on that card.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about more advanced actions such as the following:

• Clearing and setting custom field values
• Sorting lists by attributes such as dates, labels, or fields
• Finding one or more cards and performing actions
• Sending Slack messages with Trello

Now, grab some coffee because there’s a lot to go through here!

Field actions

If you want to do any automation of updating or clearing custom fields, this is your section!

Custom fields only available for Trello Standard or higher plans

If you aren’t using them, you can skip right past this section and come back one day when you need it. But if you are using custom fields (or if you aren’t but you’ve thought about it), you have a lot of options for automating those fields, so let’s dive in!

Figure 8.1 – Field actions

In Chapter 3, we learned about how powerful custom fields were, and we didn’t even talk about automation! While they’re pretty nifty just sitting around on cards, the real potency comes from being able to tie automations to them.

If you think your use case is so unique that Trello probably can’t handle it, then I’d say you probably haven’t used custom fields to their full potential. Although we’ve discussed a lot of actions...

Sort actions

We all like a little bit of order, so sorting actions give you options to clean up your cards. Sorting works by list, so if you want to sort your entire board, you’ll need to add an action for each list. Get excited though, because you have a lot more sorting options here than you do with the actions inside a list.

Figure 8.2 – Sort actions

For folks who prefer their cards in a specific order, I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that this section is going to be life-changing for you. These actions help you organize cards in lists by what matters most to you, whether it’s due dates, custom field values, or even labels. While you can manually sort a list by clicking the ellipses at the top of a list, the options there are actually a bit more limited than the automation options. Specifically, there’s no option to sort by labels. That’s where automation shines!

If you’ve ever sorted...

Cascade actions

I assume you’re reading this book because you want to deep dive into all things Trello. But there’s a ton of value in the automation we’ve talked about already (and will continue discovering), so even if you never touch this section, you can still build really powerful automation in your boards.

So just pause, reflect on what you’ve learned, and grab another cup of coffee (or a nice bourbon if you're head is spinning already!). You don’t have to remember all of this. Just take the next few minutes to absorb and see all that’s possible within the world of Trello automation. And if you want to skip this and come back later, I’ll be here!

When you click the Cascade section, the first thing you see is a very useful callout that explains why you might use this section of actions.

Figure 8.5 – Description of when to use Cascade actions

The actions in this section are useful for...

Other tool actions

To combine Trello with other tools through automation, you’ll often need to use third-party automation software, such as Zapier. But there are a few tools you can build automation for within Trello’s automation suite.

Before creating the automations, you’ll need to connect the tools you want to use in the App automations section in your Trello Automation settings. You can find it in the bottom left-hand side of the automation menu.

Figure 8.10 –Additional automation settings

As much as I love Trello, even I understand that not everything can be done in Trello. While I wish everyone would use Trello, sometimes people prefer Jira. And Trello isn’t meant for code management and handling pull requests. And while I can communicate about tasks via Trello comments, there are still a lot of reasons I need to use Slack.

Rather than pretending you can do everything in Trello, automation helps you find the...

Summary

Wow, that covers a lot. I bet you’re either feeling exhausted or inspired...or maybe both! That’s okay! Remember—you don’t have to actually remember all of these things. Instead, you just want to get to know the foundation so you can come back and find them when you wonder, “Is it possible for cards to be checklist items and stay in sync?” Spoiler, the answer is yes, if you pair together a lot of these actions.

In the next chapter, we’re going to talk about how you can bring triggers and actions together to form workflows for your automation.