Zen went live in July and the past four months have been a blur. Over the last few weeks we’ve been relatively quiet, as we took a step back and focused on improving our infrastructure, code quality, user experience, and performance, and snuck a few features in while we were at it.

So, without further ado, here’s a quick tour around what we’ve been up to:

New Public-Facing Website

First, by now you’ve probably noticed that our blog has a new theme. This is to match our completely-redesigned public-facing website! When we launched the original site back in May, Zen was still under heavy development, and parts of the application were pretty ugly to look at. That’s why our old public-facing site didn’t feature much in the way of screenshots. Now that Zen has stabilized and we’ve been able to put a coat of polish on it, we’ve created a brand-new video tour to demonstrate the product.

File Attachments

We’ve mentioned it was in the works already, but we’re happy to announce that paid plans now support file attachments! File storage is determined by your plan size: the Personal plan comes with 3GB of storage, the Pro plan has 10GB, Plus has 20GB, and Unlimited has as much as you’d like. You can upload multiple files at once (think Gmail), and once attached, files are available with a quick click directly from the board. Attachments can be up to 50MB in size, which we think should be enough for any uses – if you need more, let us know, and we can tweak the maximum.

Archived Projects

The new version also introduces the ability to archive projects. When you archive a project, it’s taken offline, but all of your data is retained, so you can access it again if you ever need it. Only paid plans support archived projects, and the project limit for each plan now represents the number of active projects you can have at once – there’s no limit on the number of archived projects.

New Story Screen

One of our favorite new features in the new version is a much-improved story screen. Originally, the story screen was mostly a read-only area, where you could view performance metrics and the history for a given story. In the new version, anything you can do to a story from the board, you can also do from the story screen – including editing tags, colors, moving the story between phases, attaching files, etc. Certain things can only be done from the story screen, like renaming and deleting attachments, and deleting the story itself. We’re trying hard to avoid the temptation to cram a lot of functionality onto the limited real estate of the board.

Soft WIP Limits

(Edit: Forgot to mention this one originally!) If you’re using work-in-progress (WIP) limits, you’ll notice that you can now override them as necessary. Your process, and by extension Zen, should never get in the way of your work. Now, if a phase has the exact number of stories to match its WIP limit, its header will turn red, and if you over-fill it, the entire column will turn red to indicate that the WIP limit has been violated. To see the new WIP limits in action, check out the video here, under Focus at the job on hand.

User Experience Improvements

We’ve also made significant improvements to the user experience, and we’re pretty confident we’ve squashed pretty much every bug that you’ve pointed out. Naturally, if you find any issues (new or still-lingering), let us know… we need you to keep us honest. :)

We’ve also made some dramatic improvements to our infrastructure, and while you won’t appreciate them as much as us, we’re confident that it will allow us to speed our release cadence dramatically going forward. This means more features and faster bug fixes, which is something that our users will appreciate more than cleaner code. :)

Performance Improvements

We’ve introduced bundling for our CSS and JavaScript files. This means that all of our different scripts are combined into a single file, which is then optimized, and delivered to you in compressed form. Zen’s CSS stylesheet is now only 14KB, all of the JavaScript for the entire application is only 125KB, and you only need to download it once! Long story short, this should dramatically improve Zen’s performance; particularly the speed at which individual pages load.

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Last but certainly not least, because we’re sure you’ll love Zen if you try it out, we’re now offering 30-day money-back guarantees on all paid plans. If you cancel your account or downgrade to the free plan within 30 days of purchasing, any charges that were applied to your account automatically refunded. We’ve updated our terms of service and billing policy to represent this change, so please give them another once-over to see the changes. (Only the sections involving refunds have been altered, the rest is exactly the same.)

The Road Ahead

So, what’s next? Well, on this release we deviated pretty dramatically from our usual way of doing business. Since several of the updates were interrelated (particularly with the new public-facing website), we were forced to move away from our typical cadence of releasing new features constantly. Believe me when I say we’re excited to get back to doing rapid-fire releases over the next few weeks!

The next two features that we’re planning to roll out will be the ability to create task lists within each story, and the introduction of a powerful new search engine. We will be returning to release-per-feature, with a goal of a new release every week.

Thanks again very much to everyone who’s sent in feedback, and please keep it coming, along with any questions you might have. It’s fantastic to see so many people as excited as we are about Zen, and we love hearing from each and every one of you!