Welcome to SimpleBoards

SimpleBoards is a WordPress plugin that adds a public ideas board and product roadmap to your own site. Visitors send ideas, vote on the ones they want most, and watch your roadmap move from "Planned" to "In Progress" to "Done". Everything lives inside your WordPress admin. No outside service is needed.

This page explains what you get, how the plugin is split between the free version and the Pro add-on, and what to read next.

What you can do with the free plugin

The free plugin is called SimpleBoards - Ideas and Roadmap Solution. With it, you can:

Create one or more boards. Each board has an Ideas tab and a Roadmap tab.
Let visitors submit ideas. Logged-in users and guests are both supported.
Let visitors vote on ideas. One vote per person, per item.
Show a kanban-style roadmap with columns like Planned, In Progress, and Done.
Group items by category and tag them with a status.
Hold new ideas for review before they appear on the board.
Send email when a new idea is sent in or when an item is rejected.
Let people subscribe to an item and get an email when it changes.
Import ideas from a LoopedIn CSV export.
Place a board on any WordPress page with a short shortcode.

The free plugin is the full feedback loop. You can run a public roadmap with only the free version.

What the Pro add-on adds

The Pro add-on is a second plugin called SimpleBoards Roadmap Pro. It needs the free plugin to work. Pro adds:

Private boards. Limit a board to logged-in users in roles you pick.
Announcements. Publish release notes that show as a tab on the board and as a small badge in a sidebar or menu.
Workflow rules. Move an idea to the roadmap when it reaches a vote count. Change status when a checklist is finished. Email an admin when an item is overdue.
Checklist progress. Add a list of tasks to a roadmap item. A progress bar shows on the card.
Design controls. Change colors, spacing, vote button shape, and column width without writing CSS. Save your design as a theme and reuse it.
Torin AI. Read incoming ideas, find duplicates, and suggest the next action.

You can install the free plugin today, use it on its own, and add Pro later if you need any of the features above.

What you need before you start

A WordPress site you can log in to as an administrator.
WordPress 5.0 or later. PHP 7.2 or later.
A page (or a new one you create) where the board will live.

You do not need any third-party account. You do not need to install another plugin. SimpleBoards stores all data in your own WordPress database.

Read this next

Follow these pages in order to get a working board on your site.

Words you will see in these docs

Board. A container for ideas and roadmap items. You can have more than one board (for example, one per product).
Item. A single thing on a board. Items have a title, a description, votes, and comments. Items are either an Idea or a Roadmap Item.
Idea. An item a visitor submitted. Ideas live on the Ideas tab.
Roadmap Item. A planned or shipped item. It has a status (such as Planned, In Progress, Done). It lives on the Roadmap tab.
Status. A label that says where a roadmap item is in your process. You can rename, recolor, and reorder statuses.
Category. An optional tag that groups items, such as "Mobile" or "Reports".
Moderation. The check step before a new idea from a visitor appears on the board.
Shortcode. A short piece of text you paste into a WordPress page. It tells WordPress to show a board on that page.

You will see these words again on later pages.