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All-in on Checklists

Checklists are one of the most important parts of a company’s standard operating procedure. Checklists prevent errors and ensure compliance and standardization.

Using Podio tasks for checklists is quite clunky. Having dedicated apps with category buttons is not very versatile and not mobile friendly.

What if there were an easy way to generate and interact with checklists in Podio?

Well, there is. ProcFu’s Mini Apps can make this happen.

The SuperMenu Chrome Extension for Podio makes checkbox usage in Podio multi-line text fields possible with it’s markdown support.

This makes putting checklists anywhere in a Podio app quite easy and rather straight forward to use.

However, for this example, we’re going to extend this idea into a dedicated Checklists app in Podio with a mobile-friendly, responsive, wrapper app.

Checkbox Overview

Let’s review quickly how markdown checkboxes work.

Using square brackets with either a space or an “x” you can create a text representation of a checkbox.

[ ] To Do
[x] Already Done

What the SuperMenu extension does, is simply replace these and blocks with real clickable interactive checkboxes. The ProcFu Mini App text editor does the same.

In the absence of both, it’s still a usable way to denote todos and dones.

The Podio Setup

Lets set up our dedicated Checklists app in Podio.

We need an app with:

We also need a view in this app to filter out only those items assigned to the currently logged-in user, and which are not marked as completed.

Some Automation Magic

Now, we don’t want to have to manage the completeness status of each checklist. And since we don’t have to, we won’t. We’ll let an automation deal with this.

It’s a pretty simple flow that’s set to trigger when a checklist text value has changed.

It then counts how many empty checkboxes we have (“”), and if it’s zero, set the the status as complete, else unset the status.

The formulae for the IF statements are:

substr_count([(Checklist) Checklist], "[ ]") == 0

and

substr_count([(Checklist) Checklist], "[ ]") > 0

The Mini App

Now that we have Podio all set up, let’s build a mini app to interact with the data nicely.

We’ll set the authentication to be Podio with no users app (assuming users of this app will have access rights in Podio directly).

The first screen we’ll need is a list of incomplete checklists. We’re using the new view to only return incomplete items assigned to the logged in user, so we don’t really need to show much else except the title.

On Click we’ll need a new screen to show the details of the checklist item. To make it interactive, the mode will be “Edit” and we’ll only show the most essential data.

Don't forget to set the next screen on the start page to be the list.

The Result

The end result is a nice little mobile-friendly mini app that allows users to see their incomplete checklists.

The experience inside Podio with the SuperMenu is very similar.

And even without the SuperMenu, it’s still a usable checklist.

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