Coloured lists in Trello

Gareth Saunders

Friday 7 March 2014

As you probably know, we’re big fans of Trello here in the web team.

We have a number of project boards, overseen by one master, everything-we’re-doing™ board called @Web team. It currently has 24 columns (or lists) which makes quickly navigating to the right list a little tricky at times.

So today I quickly wrote a hacky little Tampermonkey (Chrome) / Greasemonkey (Firefox) script to add background colours to certain lists.

For colours, I simply selected an at-random theme from Adobe Kuler.

It could be optimised but it does what I need to without too much of a performance hit, and already I’ve found it really helpful to immediately identify the “in progress”, “this week” and “done” columns, as well as marking our project backlog columns.

// ==UserScript==
// @name Web team - Trello highlight lists
// @description Highlight certain columns in Trello.
// @include https://trello.com/b/YOUR-BOARD-URL
// @require https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js
// @version 2.1
// @copyright 2014, Gareth J M Saunders
// ==/UserScript==

$('body').hover(function() {
$("h2:contains('PROJECTS'), h2:contains('TEAM ADMIN')").css('color', black).parents('.list').css('background', brown);
$("h2:contains('IN PROGRESS')").css('color', black).parents('.list').css('background', green);
$("h2:contains('THIS')").css('color', white).parents('.list').css('background', red);
$("h2:contains('DONE')").css('color', white).parents('.list').css('background', black);
});
});


Please feel free to use it, adapt it, improve it, comment on this.

Obviously, change the ‘contains:’ keywords to find your own list headings, and the @include URL to that of your board.

Update

• I noticed that I was trying to pull in the jQuery file under http rather than https, which was causing problems.
• It turns out that the DOM loads long before the content, as there is some Ajax jiggery-pokery going on. So I’m using a hover event on the body to force the colours to change, which is a horrible hack but works, and does also pick up new lists created with these keywords.
• 2014-12-08 I’ve discovered that rather than // @include https://trello.com/b/YOUR-BOARD-URL, I can use // @match //trello.com/* which will then work across all my Trello boards and follows the protocol of the board being viewed (which seems to always be https:// for me).

To do

1. Use arrays and or variables to store common colours.
2. Improve the event handling to determine the best way to load the script.
3. Reduce duplication with regards to identifying the column (h2:contains gets repeated a lot) and adding the CSS rules.