Hi everyone,
I am working on a new tool called Asadocs (happy to get name ideas!). The goal is simple: turn any Asana project into a webpage. That would be useful to manage documentations, FAQ, policies… into Asana and let your teams update them within Asana, and getting an automatically built webpage out of it.
Anyone thinks this would be interesting/useful? I am not sure yet how that would work, either generating an HTML people will integrate themselves, or hosting a webpage on the service domain, or offering custom domains… Any idea would be useful at this point.
I am starting a launchrock today if you want to follow the project!
PS: kuddos to Daniel at Instagantt who got this idea first!
21 Likes
Very interesting idea, @Bastien_Siebman. If you could embed natively in Wordpress (or any CMS), I think you’ll get a lot more traction on it. It would certainly make me more interested!
8 Likes
Interesting idea! We use Asana as a repository of longer-lived information quite a bit on the inside; if other folks are doing this, I could see it being pretty useful for publishing to the outside world.
Wordpress and other CMS would be pretty high on the roadmap if I go ahead with this idea.
Also thanks Matt, maybe Asana would find it useful as well ^^
3 Likes
I’ve been thinking about a way to present project plans to clients. This may be a really interesting way of displaying project data. What type of data would you be including with this? Based on your example, you only seem to have the task title and description, which makes sense for building a FAQ page. Would you also be including other task data?
6 Likes
interesting idea! another vote for WordPress if it goes ahead.
4 Likes
At this point, this is only an idea. I am working on a prototype as we speak, including task title and notes. Any suggestion is welcomed!
2 Likes
Would you consider a PDF output? I’m also curious about the web page output, but considering we would be using this for client’s project plans, we would just need to publish the page to a private location that only they could access.
If you are willing to pay, I can consider it 
that would not have been in my top feature list otherwise.
The first version will generate an HTML output you can paste anywhere, including on a private page hosted somewhere. V1 would probably generate a page hosted on our website and updated after every change through webhooks. V2 would include a WordPress plugin… That is currently the roadmap I have in mind, but I would be very happy to adapt it if people are willing to engage!
Contact me on contact@templana.com so we can discuss further.
1 Like
Let me take it back to the team and discuss. I have been getting a bit of pushback trying to get buying to use Asana for this purpose. We currently use a different software to do the bulk of our project management, but as always there are some limitations, so we’re using a lot of various alternative solutions to fill in the gaps. Asana is by far the best option, but a presentable client facing project plan output is the main area my team finds it lacking.
I’ll reach out to you to let you know how it goes with the team, and if we want to move forward.
You should reach out to the support team at Asana if you are struggling with conversion I am sure they can help.
Regarding your PDF request, if you have an in-house team they might be able to do it, otherwise tell me. I can also provide the code if they want to take it from there.
Here is a preview of the current prototype! What do you guys think?
Home
Choose a workspace
Choose a project
HTML code
and rendered code
6 Likes
Very neat, @Bastien_Siebman. It seems like that is a hard-coded. What I thought it was doing was pulling live from Asana data (or some kind of 15-minute cache or something).
The value I see from something like this is if you can manage your FAQ or data in Asana and have it update a Wordpress website or whatever site live. If you have to re-export data after any little change, I think it loses what would make it special.
2 Likes
Hold on tiger 
this is a very early prototype coded in less than 5 hours 
Dynamic update through webhooks and Wordpress plugin will come, I just need to decide on priorities and technical solutions.
However I think the current solution could be useful. A FAQ does not change that often, a copy-paste is cheaper than asking a dev team to intervene don’t you think?
2 Likes
haha OK it sounds like we’re on the same page! I’m always impressed with what talented developers can make in a few hours, wish I knew more in that area! 
3 Likes
Thanks 
there are some great challenges ahead, I need to find clever ways to solve them.
1 Like
When I first saw this topic, I was not sure but now I have an idea of how I would use it.
Project documentation - how website should look and work is now described in PDF document. Asana tasks duplicate this info for developers by breaking it down. For example how Homepage should look & work is described both in PDF document and also in Asana “Homepage” task. Duplication is not good of course, sync issues, etc. So, maybe that document could be generated by your module.
That case would need to work with custom fields too. For example, I might have 50+ tasks, but only 10 of them are actual Epics (large tasks) - Homepage, My Account, etc. I only need them to be generated in document.
What do you think about this case?
My idea is not to generate an entire website with this system but only some pages like documentation, event list, FAQ… Once I do this, maybe the next step is the entire website but I am not sûre this would be easy to manage in terms of design.
@Bastien_Siebman Not website generation. I also mean documentation like you. So, basically I am talking about same thing just adding one - custom fields might be useful, at least for me. I would select which tasks I need to generate documentation with. Not all tasks are documentation-worthy.
1 Like
I understand, I keep this in mind as I move forward.
1 Like
