Orbital Changelog

• New: Added Recurring Tasks. Tasks can repeat after they are closed, approved, or completed, or on a daily, every-other-day, weekly, or monthly schedule. New occurrences include subtasks and per-task permission overrides, with optional weekend skipping, an end date, and an occurrence limit. Enable the feature under OrbitalWP > Settings > General.
• New: Rebuilt the Calendar with continuous multi-day task bars, consistent row placement, automatic overflow controls, Month and Week layouts, and a mobile-friendly Agenda view.
• New: Added saved weekend and color preferences, field-based legends that update automatically, go-to-date navigation, and an unscheduled-task tray.
• New: Calendar tasks can now be moved, resized, and scheduled with a mouse, touch, pen, keyboard, or action menu while keeping related task dates aligned.
• New: Users with task-creation access can create a task directly from a Calendar day or selected date range.
• New: Added search and parent-task filtering to Calendar day details, making it easier to focus on one task and its subtasks on busy days.
• New: Added a per-task “Manage Subtasks” permission. Grant it from Permission Overrides on a parent task to let a user add or remove that task’s subtasks without granting task-creation or subtask-management access elsewhere.
• New: Added due-date status labels to the task details panel, task view, subtask lists, and the task list’s Due Date column. Labels show “Overdue”, “Due today”, or the number of days remaining, update immediately in the task details panel, and disappear when a task is completed.
• Improved: Improved Calendar keyboard focus, dialogs, screen-reader announcements, right-to-left layouts, reduced-motion support, high-contrast support, and responsive behavior.
• Improved: Users who cannot open a locked task in the WordPress editor now receive an accurate explanation with links to the read-only task or task board when available.
• Improved: The Permissions screen now identifies permissions granted by another permission and keeps related checkboxes in sync when the parent permission is added or removed.
• Improved: Task Views now load faster and use fewer resources on large sites.
• Improved: Task Views no longer load hidden closed tasks, keeping boards responsive as completed work accumulates.
• Improved: Task card excerpts are loaded only when excerpt display is enabled.
• Improved: Boards now load tasks in a consistent order between visits.
• Improved: Read-only task links are shorter and require less data while keeping the same permission checks.
• Improved: Subtask completion, reset, and approval now behave consistently across the edit screen, Task Viewer, Task Views, and the admin task list.
• Changed: Closing or reopening a parent task now applies the same state to its entire subtask tree. Subtasks continue to inherit their parent’s closed state.
• Changed: Approved or closed tasks, including descendants locked by an ancestor, are now read-only in the WordPress editor. Administrators can inspect them and use permitted workflow controls, but ordinary task content and settings stay locked. Only administrators can close or reopen tasks.
• Changed: Administrators and authorized approvers can now unapprove a closed task from Task Viewer, the task details panel, or Kanban. Unapproving does not reopen the task or reset its completion, and a closed task cannot be newly approved. Ordinary editing resumes after both approval and closure locks are cleared.
• Changed: A per-task Edit permission no longer allows adding or removing subtasks. Grant “Manage Subtasks” to affected users after updating. Task owners, administrators, and users who can edit all tasks are unaffected.
• Changed: “Receive Notifications” now requires “Read All Tasks”, and “Manage Task Taxonomy” now requires “Edit All Tasks”. Existing assignments that lack these prerequisites remain saved but inactive. Review OrbitalWP > Permission Settings after updating. “View Reports” remains independent and continues to respect each user’s task access.
• Changed: Renamed “Create and Edit Own Tasks” to “Read, Edit, Create Own Tasks.” Its behavior is unchanged.
• Changed: Tasks due today are no longer marked overdue. Overdue status now begins after the due date passes in the site’s timezone across task views, Reports, and reminders. Legacy 0000-00-00 values are treated as having no due date.
• Fixed: Workflow-lock messages now correctly identify whether a task is approved, closed, or both and give authorized users the correct next step.
• Fixed: The Edit Task button in the task details panel now updates immediately after a task is closed or reopened.
• Fixed: The Add Subtask form now shows only fields the user can submit, including the correct custom field, category, tag, and assignee options.
• Fixed: Failed task-template applications now clean up completely.
• Fixed: Reordering or moving a Kanban card no longer clears the saved order of other tasks in the lane. Full lane orders of up to 5,000 cards are supported; larger reorder attempts now show a failure instead of appearing to save.
• Fixed: On sites using a persistent object cache, archiving or unarchiving a task now updates Board, List, Timeline, and Calendar immediately.
• Fixed: Authorized non-administrators can now move Kanban cards when the board is grouped by a custom field.
• Fixed: Moving a Kanban card to a new lane now saves the lane change even if its position within that lane cannot be stored.
• Fixed: Task cards now count only subtasks the current user can see, preventing incorrect date-dragging restrictions in Calendar and Timeline.
• Fixed: The closed-task control remains available if showing closed tasks makes a board too large to load, so closed tasks can be hidden again.
• Fixed: Saving the Permissions screen now works on sites with a large number of WordPress roles without exhausting available memory.
• Fixed: Permission checkboxes and the granted-permissions summary now agree on the Users tab, including permissions inherited from another permission.
• Fixed: Changing multiple permission checkboxes in quick succession no longer loses an earlier change.
• Fixed: “Reset to Default” now restores the complete default permission set, including “Manage Assignees” and “Manage Task Taxonomy” where applicable.
• Fixed: When closed tasks are hidden, grouping by “Closed Tasks” and revealing a closed task through the Parent Tasks filter now work correctly.
• Security: Subtask creation now applies the parent’s category and tag permissions, preventing unauthorized taxonomy changes.
• Security: Strengthened task and subtask creation protections.
• Security: Approved and closed task locks now apply consistently across Orbital and WordPress editing tools. Trash, permanent deletion, and untrash behavior are unchanged.
• Security: Orbital Managed visibility now prevents visitors and users without task access from discovering restricted task addresses, task taxonomy details, or unassigned tasks through public WordPress output. WordPress Standard mode is unchanged.
• Security: The Team Workload report now shows assignee email addresses only to users who can view the site’s user list. Names and task counts remain available to everyone who can open the report.
• Security: The “Related Post” filter now lists only posts the current user is allowed to read, including when linked tasks are visible.

• Compatibility: Tested up to WordPress 7.0.2

• New: Added a “Delete Tasks” permission so trashing and deleting tasks can be granted per role or per user, separately from edit access. It requires the “Edit All Tasks” permission, or grant a per-task Delete override. Edit access alone no longer deletes tasks, and administrators are unaffected.
• Security: Hardened permission checks so user permission overrides are validated against known permissions and task-hierarchy lookups are depth-bounded, preventing malformed data from stalling a request.
• Polish: License manager and plugin update system polish

• Polish: Auto populate field label from field key entry saving typing time. User can manually edit the field label.
• Fixed: REST rate limiting so steady under-limit activity resets by time window instead of locking users out until they stop all requests.
• Fixed: subtask creation so custom field values are sanitized by field type instead of field-key substrings, preserving submitted priority, text, and URL values.
• Fixed: completed-board Kanban drags so subtask-only completion or reset actions no longer move the parent card into the wrong lane.
• Fixed: completion controls staying disabled, mislabeled, or reverting a successful save after the completion panel was dismissed with the X button, ESC, or an overlay click.
• Fixed: removed assignees not receiving the “Assignee Removed” notification when their access came only from being assigned.
• Fixed: the Reports dashboard Open Tasks and Overdue Tasks counts to exclude completed and closed tasks.
• Fixed: batch subtask completion so the parent task is not marked complete or auto-approved when some subtasks could not be completed.
• Fixed: subtask reset reporting success when the parent task could not be marked incomplete.
• Fixed: the completed field accepting invalid values through the REST API.
• Fixed: Kanban field updates saving an assignee that does not exist.
• Fixed: a crash when array values were submitted for select, date, URL, or email custom fields.
• Fixed: checkbox custom fields with numeric option keys losing their checked state.
• Fixed: assignees not seeing subtasks they are assigned to in the post Tasks metabox until after a refresh.
• Fixed: trashing a parent task leaving private or scheduled subtasks behind.
• Fixed: the template picker showing the wrong modified date near midnight on non-UTC sites.
• Fixed: the Category Breakdown report counting trashed tasks in its totals.
• Fixed: orphaned custom field cleanup failing for field keys containing dashes and reporting success on database errors.
• Fixed: the Permission Overrides report showing “no” for permissions a role holds through implications.
• Fixed: the Gantt Chart timeline horizontal scrollbar so it stays visible at the bottom of the screen when many tasks make the timeline tall.
• Security: various security enhancements
• Translation: Updated the Spanish translation for the Custom Fields field key helper text that underscores are allowed.

Key Features

• Task Custom Post Type
• Kanban Board
• Gantt Timeline
• Calendar View
• List View
• Custom Field Editor
• Role, User, Task permission system
• Task Templates
• Post-to-Task relationship
• Task assignee and task completion system
• Notification System
• Reports
• Task Tag and Category Taxonomy