Knowledge Base - dashboard widget

Inspiration

So far, in our daily work, we have used Confluence when working with tasks in Jira, which is why we know how important it is to exchange knowledge in a team. Getting to know monday, doing research for the hackathon, after a short time of use, we noticed it as something we cannot work without.

In addition, our friends who have more experience working with monday pointed out such examples when they lack this functionality:

• marketing tasks → we lack a place where we can upload the results of the sem campaign and link to the application, a place to create a content plan
• business → we would like to be able to create separate pages for each client with a history of cooperation / contact with him
• project documentation
• retro → not enough space to save what happened during retro and action points from it
• team spirit → outside work, the team has various passions that they would like to share with others

Therefore, we decided to add the ability to build a knowledge base in monday.

What it does

This extension allows you to create a knowledge base in Monday. Using this app is a child's play! All you need to do is add a widget to the previously created dashboard ... and it's ready! Two modes are available: View and Edit. In Edit mode, you can create new pages, edit their content, format texts, add graphics. Thanks to this, the valuable knowledge of your team will not get lost in the depths of emails, messages on messengers, or comments on tasks. One source of truth is easily accessible to everyone (if the dashboard is shared with others).

Thanks to the application, users can:

• create pages with the tree structure
• build an internal knowledge base, intranet
• write a blog for employees
• share the onboarding process (extension of the use case described here ... and many others

How we built it

The app is built using reactJS. We used 3rd party libs like antd (tree component) and react-quillas wysiwyg editor. Another interesting solution is to use styled-components as a styling library (CSS). The application is hosted on Heroku (Node.js Express).

Challenges we ran into

The use of API Storage in our case is too restrictive. Currently, we do not have any synchronization between several users and saving to the Storage. This will require either rewriting the data on the side of our application or waiting for improvements in the Monday Storage API itself. The problem with saving the pictures also remains to be solved. This is now resolved so that it is written to the "content" of the page after converting it to base64. Time was chasing us, even though there was a lot more than the classic weekend hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first monday app. We are glad that we were able to implement a product that works: from the idea, through development, to the finished app.

What we learned

We get to know a new ecosystem, a new marketplace. We learned what monday can do, not only for developers to write extensions but also for the users themselves.

What's next for Knowledge Base

We are not resting on our laurels - quite the contrary! We have ideas for the development of this app, and more will probably come along with the users.

• Option to export updates from the task directly to the knowledge base page (creating a page based on comments)
• Adding search capabilities on saved pages
• Possibility to export the saved page to .pdf
• Edit / View permissions
• Possibility to create tasks based on selected pages (for example project documentation, where each page is a separate requirement)

Built With

• antd
• figma
• heroku
• monday-design-system
• react
• react-quill
• styled-components