RefractTrack Stages: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:51, 28 August 2026

Stages

Stages are the columns tasks move through on your board — your team's own workflow, from "not started yet" through to "done." You'll find them under Manage → Stages.

Every project gets its own set

Stages belong to a single project. Every new project starts out with a standard, ready-to-use set — Not Started, In Progress, In Review, Blocked, and Done — which you're free to rename, reorder, add to, or remove entirely. Changing one project's stages never touches any other project's.

What you can set on each stage

Name — call it whatever fits your workflow.
Order — drag stages into the sequence that makes sense for your team.
Requires an assignee — turn this on for stages where work shouldn't sit unowned (In Progress and In Review have this on by default).
Marks work as done — flags a stage as a completion point, which other features (like bulk archiving) can key off of.
Visibility — a stage can be hidden from the board without deleting it or its tasks.

Hiding a stage vs. deleting one

Hiding a stage just removes its lane from the board — any tasks already in it stay exactly where they are and are still fully reachable from the list view or the task's own page. New tasks will never land in a hidden stage automatically, and you can't hide every stage in a project (there always has to be at least one visible one).

Deleting a stage is only allowed once it's empty — RefractTrack won't let you delete a stage that still has tasks sitting in it, so you'll never lose track of work by accident.

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 == Stages ==
-Stages are a project's swimlanes — the columns/workflow steps tasks move through on the [[RefractTrack_Board_and_List_Views|board]]. Managed from Manage → Stages (<code><nowiki>stages.php</nowiki></code> / <code><nowiki>stage_form.php</nowiki></code>).
+Stages are the columns tasks move through on your [[RefractTrack_Board_and_List_Views|board]] — your team's own workflow, from "not started yet" through to "done." You'll find them under Manage → Stages.
-=== Per-project ===
+=== Every project gets its own set ===
-Stages are '''per-project''': every project gets its own independent set, seeded at creation with a standard starter set (Not Started / In Progress / In Review / Blocked / Done). Renaming, hiding, reordering, or deleting a stage in one project has no effect on any other project's stages.
+Stages belong to a single project. Every new project starts out with a standard, ready-to-use set — ''Not Started'', ''In Progress'', ''In Review'', ''Blocked'', and ''Done'' — which you're free to rename, reorder, add to, or remove entirely. Changing one project's stages never touches any other project's.
-=== What you can configure per stage ===
+=== What you can set on each stage ===
-* '''Name'''
+* '''Name''' — call it whatever fits your workflow.
-* '''Order''' — reorder the swimlanes from the Stages page
+* '''Order''' — drag stages into the sequence that makes sense for your team.
-* '''Requires assignee''' — whether moving a task into this stage requires picking an assignee first (defaults on for '''In Progress''' and '''In Review''')
+* '''Requires an assignee''' — turn this on for stages where work shouldn't sit unowned (In Progress and In Review have this on by default).
-* '''Is done''' — flags a stage as a completion state (used elsewhere, e.g. bulk "archive all done")
+* '''Marks work as done''' — flags a stage as a completion point, which other features (like bulk archiving) can key off of.
-* '''Visibility''' — a stage can be hidden from the board without deleting it
+* '''Visibility''' — a stage can be hidden from the board without deleting it or its tasks.
-=== Hiding vs. deleting ===
+=== Hiding a stage vs. deleting one ===
-* A '''hidden''' stage's tasks stay exactly where they are and remain reachable from the task detail page or List view; the stage just doesn't get its own lane on the board. New tasks always default into the first ''visible'' stage, so nothing you create can land somewhere invisible. You can't hide the last remaining visible stage in a project.
+'''Hiding''' a stage just removes its lane from the board — any tasks already in it stay exactly where they are and are still fully reachable from the list view or the task's own page. New tasks will never land in a hidden stage automatically, and you can't hide every stage in a project (there always has to be at least one visible one).
-* '''Deleting''' a stage only succeeds if no tasks currently sit in it (<code><nowiki>stage_id</nowiki></code> has no <code><nowiki>ON DELETE</nowiki></code> clause in the schema — i.e. <code><nowiki>RESTRICT</nowiki></code> — which enforces this as a second line of defense behind the application-level check).
-=== Permissions ===
+'''Deleting''' a stage is only allowed once it's empty — RefractTrack won't let you delete a stage that still has tasks sitting in it, so you'll never lose track of work by accident.
-Stage management (<code><nowiki>stages:view</nowiki></code>, <code><nowiki>stages:create</nowiki></code>, <code><nowiki>stages:edit</nowiki></code>, <code><nowiki>stages:reorder</nowiki></code>, <code><nowiki>stages:delete</nowiki></code>) is deliberately '''not''' a project-scoped permission set, even though the stages themselves are project-owned data. Whether a user can manage stages at all is a global grant; only ''which'' project's stages they're looking at changes per page. See "Project-scoped permissions" in [[RefractTrack_Permissions_and_Roles|Permissions and Roles]].
 === Related pages ===

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Revision as of 13:51, 28 August 2026

Stages

Every project gets its own set

What you can set on each stage

Hiding a stage vs. deleting one

Related pages