We’re thrilled to bring you some incredible updates and improvements in this round of Confetti Moments! Read on to learn more about everything we’ve built, optimized, and fixed.

Confetti Moments is our quarterly update highlighting the most recent product improvements to help you stay up to date on what’s new.

What’s new ✨

Automated Workflows! That’s right! Workflows has been updated with a series of small changes since its release just two weeks ago.

• Improved timeline events when an Issue is moved due to an automation. See who, what, where, and when an Issue was moved and be able to track it through your workflow.

• Improved notifications on the Board when moving Issues between pipelines. You will now see where an Issue is moved in other Workspaces based connected through your workflow.

• In-context prompts when creating a new Workspace or manually moving Issues in another Workspace (PS. If you’re still manually moving Issues in other Workspaces… click the “Workflows” link on the sidebar!)

Data-packed Epic updates! We took your old Issue list (within an Epic) and packed it with even more data: Repos, Estimates, Assignees, and Labels! But don’t worry, the same loveable features are still part of the list too: sorted by (pipeline) status, nested Epics, and Issues from other Workspaces. And that’s not all! Hover over an Issue to see some more goodies:

• Remove an Issue from the Epic
• Move an Issue to top/bottom of pipeline
• Pin an Issue as high priority
• Reopen/Close an Issue directly from the list

Focused onboarding for your teammates! We know you are busy, so new and invited ZenHub users will see brand new onboarding to help them discover and use the features you’re already familiar with. Feeling left out? Not to worry! You can click “View Tutorials” on the sidebar to experience what it was like to be [a] young [ZenHub user] again.

Performance, fixes, and updates

Performance When updating GitHub repo permissions for a user, the majority of users will now be able to immediately view their Workspace. We now re-query GitHub for the new permissions if a user tries to access a ZenHub Workspace without read/write permissions to any of the repos.

Update We love GitHub’s recent UI changes (even though they didn’t play nice with the ZenHub extension). Not to worry! We have many real-time alerts for GitHub changes and were able to resolve the problematic ones within an hour or two. Make sure to turn on automatic updates for the extension!

Update Our new Issue creator got a facelift with a wider modal, progressive loading states for metadata options, and simplified the process for choosing an Issue type.

Update You can now convert an Epic to an Issue through the Epic dropdown on the Issue sidebar. Previously, you could only convert an Issue to an Epic but now you can definitely convert an Epic back to an Issue if you had already converted the Issue to an Epic. Hope you got that.

Bug fix Repos added to a Workspace are now automatically added to Releases. A repo needs to be attached to a Release to be able to add Issues to it. For what it’s worth, we recognize this does not need to be in the UI and it’s in our backlog to remove.

Bug fix When your token expires, you are now redirected back to the previous page you were on when logging back in. No more unnecessary “select an organization” screens.

Bug fix Clicking on a pipeline when creating a Pull request no longer submits the Pull request. Yikes. If you happened to have run into this, we’re sorry. We know your pain because we ran into it as well and it was just as frustrating for us.

Bug fix Opening an Issue will now show the Issue’s title in the browsers history. Your back button works like a back button. The web is great, isn’t it?

Bug fix With our big backend update earlier this year, we have much better insight into what’s slowly you down and have been constantly tweaking. For this update, you get: faster updates from GitHub within ZenHub. We get: a lesson in how to handle webhooks between separate backend services.

Bug fix The Epic dropdown on the new Issue page in the extension has made its reappearance curtesy of a software developer named Mel.

Looking forward

Workspace filtering

Our last Confetti Moments was heavily focused on performance and we have even more to add in the coming weeks. We’ve received a lot of feedback that Workspaces contain many Issues irrelevant to the team and team’s use a specific label to differentiate themselves from other teams.

We are currently experimenting with a label filter for Workspaces. This setting will only download and render Issues and Pull requests with a specific label, hiding all other irrelevant cards on the Board.

Simplifying Workspace creation

To set up a new Workspace, there are quite a few options and buttons and switches and inputs and … well, you get the point. So, what are we going to do about it?

Automated Board setup for new Workspaces

When you create a new Workspace, we will automate sorting your Issues into Pipelines based on their status, activity, and metadata (labels, estimates, etc). We’re still working on the rules and are excited to release another click-saving feature!

Use Workflows to clone pipelines from other Workspaces

When you’ve created a new Workspace (or even if you have existing Workspaces you’d like to sync), there will be a new Workflows option to move and sync all Issues currently in your source pipeline to the destination pipeline.

Remove the “Merge repos/sort Issues into pipelines” screen

When creating a Workspace (or adding repos to it), cloning and syncing between Workspaces will be better handled through Workflows. With that said, we’re happy to announce we get to remove screens in the app and lines in our code. If you haven’t caught the theme yet: use Workflows and let us do the heavy lifting!

Dates in the Epics

You will soon be able to easily add dates to your Epic and view it on the Roadmap. It will save you extra clicks and make it easy to keep the Roadmap up to date for all your stakeholders.  

Kubernetes for ZenHub Enterprise

The team is getting close to shipping an alpha build of ZenHub Enterprise 3.0 for Kubernetes. This version of ZenHub will allow On Premise customers to run the application on their existing Kubernetes cluster taking full advantage of all the distributed cloud benefits that come with it: horizontal scaling of resources, fine controls over application configuration, ability to integrate with externally managed databases, ability to store assets in scaled object storage services, improved security, and much more! This will unlock better performance for users, make the system easier to maintain for administrators, and provide a better experience for your team.

That’s all folks

As always, we’re excited to bring you new features and improvements and we will continue listening to your feedback through our public product roadmap.

And don’t forget, we’re on Slack! You can now stay up-to-date on what’s new and share learnings, tips, and tricks with the ZenHub community. Click here to join.

If you want to improve your team’s results, try out our brand new eBook “Focused Teams”. Download our free eBook, available here for free in Mobi, ePub, and PDF formats.