Getting started
Your portal
Your portal is the public side of CatchLoop: a board, a roadmap and a changelog on their own URL, server-rendered so search engines index them. Each team has one portal, and everything about it is in Settings: its address under General, its name and look under Portal.
Name, slug and look
| Field | Rule | Where it shows | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workspace name | 1 to 80 characters | required | Your team in the dashboard, and in sign-in and announcement emails. |
| Portal URL | lowercase, digits and single hyphens, up to 40 | optional | The public URL: /w/<slug>. |
| Portal name | 1 to 80 characters | optional | The title above your requests, and the name beside your logo. |
| Description | up to 200 characters | optional | One line under the title. Search engines show it too. |
| Logo URL | must start with http:// or https:// | optional | Portal header, next to the name. |
| Accent colour | a hex value | optional | Buttons and links on the portal and in emails. |
The portal URL is public. Changing it after you have shared links breaks every one of them, and search engines have to rediscover the pages. Pick it once, early.
Your colour, not ours
The accent colour is the client-facing one: it drives your portal and the emails your customers receive. CatchLoop's own cobalt stays on this marketing site and inside the dashboard you work in. The two never mix, so your portal does not look like a CatchLoop page with your name on it.
Board, roadmap, changelog
- Board. Every request, with its status and one vote count: the votes of your customers' accounts plus any votes you imported. Filter by status; sort by votes, newest or status. Each request has its own page, with its comments.
- Roadmap. Three columns, Planned, In progress and Shipped, built from the statuses. There is nothing to maintain by hand.
- Changelog. The entries you publish, each one linked to the requests it delivered.
The portal renders its content as HTML with no JavaScript required. Filters and pagination are ordinary links with real URLs, which is what makes each request an indexable page rather than a state inside an app.
The five statuses
| Status | What it tells your customers |
|---|---|
| New | Posted, not decided yet. Where every request starts. |
| Planned | You have decided to build it. Shown on the roadmap. |
| In progress | Work has started. Shown on the roadmap. |
| Shipped | It is live. Publishing a changelog entry sets it for you. |
| Not planned | You decided against it. Your reason shows on the request page, and the votes stay. |
Changing a status emails nobody. Your customers hear from you once, when you publish the changelog entry that ships their request: see announcements.