Use Alpaca as a self-hosted kanban solution, with the hooks you need to make it your own

• Alpaca isn’t just an issue tracker. It comes with a full-featured kanban project board experience, built into the WordPress admin interface.
• Your clients will love its familiar interface, right where they need it.
• Your developers will love its extension hooks, allowing you to add custom connections and features to make the perfect project board for your needs.

We didn’t set out to build the perfect kanban solution for WordPress.

Alpaca was born from an idea to improve issue capture. Clients wanted issue reporting to be as lightweight as possible. Developers wanted issue reports to be as heavyweight as possible. We believed the same tool could do both. (We were right, as it turned out.)

But once an issue is captured, it needs to go somewhere.

There are as many issue management methods and platforms in the world as there are agencies. Trello, Asana, Jira, Monday, ClickUp, GitHub Projects, shared Google Docs and color-coded spreadsheets… yeah, we’ve seen them all.

Typically they are built around the needs of one group of users. But what works for a manager or developer often doesn’t work for a client. And they all have the fundamental flaw of being yet another external service to sign up - and pay - for.

We decided that Alpaca needed a basic issue management solution, enough so that many smaller teams and projects wouldn’t need an external service.

But pretty soon, we were as excited by the kanban component as we were about the issue capture idea that started it all.

In fact, instead of calling Alpaca an issue tracker which ships with a kanban board, we were very close to calling it a kanban solution which could also track issues.

Alpaca’s Project Boards offer all the features you need from Trello or Asana, built in the WordPress way, using WordPress components and techniques - located within the WordPress admin interface you’re already logged into.

Issues created using Alpaca’s front-end form will also carry the full issue context, including a screenshot of exactly what the user could see. But you can also create issue cards from scratch, from the board itself - to give a classic kanban experience, adaptable to any context or situation.

Like WordPress itself, Alpaca is built with extension in mind. We use action hooks and filters throughout the Alpaca codebase for its core functionality: and you can use them too, to add any extra features, tweaks or integrations you want.

And as a self-hosted solution, you retain full control over your data - making Alpaca attractive to some very large enterprises who aren’t permitted to use cloud platforms for reasons of confidentiality.

You’ll find a checkbox on the Project Board > Configure > Settings tab, to enable or disable the front-end issue capture feature. Uncheck the box, and Alpaca becomes kanban-only.