After a long search (or was it a chase?), I chose to venture into Coda for my small consultancy’s project and client management to see if I can build something useful. So I am just starting on this journey.
Suggestion 1: Core requirement: Comment action visibility at board level
I would love to see a little visual cue (they’re so important!) of new comments on cards in kanban view - see image mock-up sketch. I know Smartsheet has little red dot and Kanban Zone shows a nice red speech bubble, when there are new comments
Suggestion 2: Core requirement: Knowing when a comment has been viewed by a Viewer (client / project stakeholder in this case)
I do kinda like the side comments visual thing but, besides the fact that they seem to glitch in Firefox, it is not clear what they are related to.
Our current client interaction UI approach would be a kanban view with various project categories that are in development at the same time. So seeing a new comment associated with a specific card (canvas?) would let me know there’s action. I know we get email notices which is great but we’re trying to get away from email precisely because people miss emails.
So I guess to have little notices on the relevant cards once a collaborator has ‘seen’ / opened (I don’t know how…?!) a comment.
PS: If this is only ‘on the cards’ (sorry) for 2027, would it be possible to have a little formula display a particular image (representing the ideal ‘icon’) on the card when there is a response? Or any other solution that might address the above?
Finally, apologies if this functionality exists and I am just missing it… please point me in the right direction.
I agree that it would be nice to have your ideas as native features, but the magic thing about Coda is that it is so flexible in many ways that you can often just implement yourself some of those ideas to a great extent. Here you have my attempt at implementing the logic you described.
I disabled the built-in comment functionality for the cards and built my own, to be able to implement the features you mentioned.
The button on the lower-right corner indicates how many comments the card has. If it has one or more comments that have not yet been ‘viewed’ by you, the button will be yellow and the icon slightly different.
Once you click the button, a window will open with all the existing comments, which will be considered ‘viewed’ by you and therefore the button will turn gray.
If somebody else creates a new comment, that comment will not be ‘viewed’ by you until you click the button again, and since not all coments of that card will be ‘viewed’ by you, the button will turn yellow.
In the comment table, there is an eye button for each comment. If somebody has ‘viewed’ the comment, their avatar will appear next to it.
Hi Pablo,
Yes! Of course it helps, thank you! Wow. That’s pretty amazing. Really appreciate your time in doing this.
Visually, this is almost exactly how I pictured it. A few comments:
It’s amazing that this is even possible, but I have no idea what the implication is of disabling the Coda commenting system (even just for the cards). I am assuming it’s a pretty robust system and I find it blazingly fast, which is refreshing. Perhaps your system, or tables generally in Coda is as fast.
Attachments are a central part of our workflow (my next feature suggestion is an image / PDF proofing system like Smartsheet & a few others offer) so I assume adding attachments should just be added as a column in the table? And if there are new attachments added, same conditional icon approach could be used?
Finally, even though we want to get rid of reliance on email only, the prompt (and record) of new posts should also be retained. So the ideal scenario would be to get access to the commenting system and have the ability to create / update blocks / elements /tables based on reposes in that system (the commenting system seems to be separate and largely inaccessible currently).
May I use your setup to mess around with it further?
If you don’t add very complex formulas that keep recalculating it should continue to be fast. You also have to consider that Coda’s stength is not holding large amounts of data in single docs, so if you start accumulating a lot of items you will have to set up some kind of archiving automation, for example for items that have been completed more than a week ago. If you search in the community you will find plenty of information about it.
Adding attachments to the comments in this doc is pretty straightforward with an attachment column. I will do it at some point later today. I’m not familiar with the proofing system you mention, but probably you can build something reasonably similar in Coda.
I built the custom commenting system using normal tables, so it’s totally accessible and you can do whatever you want with it, within Coda’s limits of course.
Sure! Feel free to copy it and customise it to your needs.
You’re a machine, Pablo. Thank you! Now I need to make time to experiment a bit.
I will make a separate post about the proofing thing, but this statement concerns me a bit:
Our whole workflow is based around PDF’s and images files and interaction with these documents. While all the great custom functionality and formulas and collaboration abilities of Coda will be key for us, document management is at its’ core. Will share more about the proposed structure elsewhere, but one of the key components will be a ‘drawings’ table (with filtered views in various pages / canvasses). A1 sized PDF’s are typically between 1.5-4.5mb. That is theoretically a max of about 8-10GB of PDF and image files in one table, including superceded files. We need to have live record of all info issued and can’t send it to an archive until the project is completed.
With traditional databases, apparently it’s good practice to use a ‘file server’ and only a link to the file in the actual ‘text’ database. But since Coda is a ‘citizen-developer’ product, I am hoping and trusting (and wishing!) that this is handles by them internally - ?
I think the rule of thumb is around 10-20k rows in the whole doc. If you don’t have many heavy formulas it should still work, but before reaching that point I would consider looking into archiving the old data somewhere else.
Having many attachments shouldn’t be an issue according to a Codan
And if you want to have backups in other platforms you can easily upload the files with OneDrive/Google Drive packs.
So that confirms that there is obviously a separate file server(I suppose that would be logical for IT folk… but now I know, too).
The 10k-20k rule of thumb is a great indication of the capacity and if file sizes don’t slow things down, that could probably work for us.
One thing that still confuses me a bit, you refer to a doc, not a table. So it’s a doc limit, not just a table limit? I’m still exploring the Coda architecture…
One of the things that I always hammer on for newcomers is to experiment, experiment, experiment.
You can treat Coda like a spreadsheet, and it will work, up to a point. You can treat Coda like a database, and it will work, up to a point. You can treat it like a word processor, and it will work up to a point.
The reason things will only work up to a point, is because Coda is none of those things, regardless of the fact that it looks like them.
Before you build your Magnum Opus, play around for a good few months to get a feel for how Coda is different, when to split a doc, when to split a page, a table, etc.
Coda is the collaborative, all-in-one platform that brings teams and tools together.
I think there are usually pleasant surprises as well as, inevitably, (unexpected) unpleasant surprises with these platforms. Looking forward to exploring Coda and try and keep expectations on the low end.
