Bring a board from Trello

Settings → Import, or /p/{projectId}/settings/import. owner and admins

A team that cannot bring its board over does not start. This page takes one Trello export and makes your project look like the board you left: the same columns, the same cards, in the same order.

Trello only, for now. Jira has no single export — its CSV repeats a column per label and per comment, its dates carry the site’s locale, and it stops at 1000 rows — so it is its own job and not a checkbox on this one.

The three steps

1. Export the board from Trello. Board menu → More → Print and export → Export as JSON. You get one .json file.
2. Pick it here. The page becomes the preview: what will be made, what will not come, and where each list is going. Nothing is written yet.
3. Press Import. The page says what it made and points you back at the board.

Nothing is kept on the server between step 2 and step 3. Your browser holds the file and sends it twice, so closing the tab is how you cancel.

What maps to what

Trello	Ushabti
A list	An option of the property your main view groups by — a column
A card	A task, in the order it had: lists by their order, cards inside them
Card title	The title
Card description	The description, markdown and all
A label	An option of Labels
Due date	Due, the date part of it, in UTC
The first member	Assignee, if somebody here has that name
Checklist items	The task’s checklist, ticks and all
Comments	Comments, oldest first, each naming who wrote it on Trello
An archived card	An archived task — but only if you turn the switch on

A list becomes an option, never a property. Where the name matches something your board already has, the import writes into that: a Trello list called in progress lands on your In Progress column, because a name matches whatever its case. Where nothing matches, one new option is added beside the others, in the next colour of the palette. The preview shows both, and you can point any list at any option before you press the button.

A property that is missing is made. A board with no Due date gets one the moment a file carries due dates — an ordinary property you can rename, move or delete afterwards. Nothing about a task is hardcoded in Ushabti, so an import cannot write a field; it can only add a property and fill it in.

Two lists of one name become one column. An option is a name on this board, so two columns called Done could not be told apart on a card, in a filter, or by your next import. The preview shows both lists and says “2 lists are called “Done”. They become one column.” before you press anything.

A card with two checklists reads Before: Draft it, because a task has one checklist. A card with one gets its items plainly, with no prefix.

People are matched, never made. Trello carries a name and no email, so the match is a name. When nobody here is called that, no account is made and no invite is sent: the name goes on the last line of the description, where a reader will find it.

What does not come

The preview counts each of these on your own file and says it in a sentence, so you read it before you press anything, not after:

• Attachments. Files on a card are left behind.
• Custom fields. There is no import for them yet.
• Start dates, and the tick that marks a due date complete.
• Everything in the history that is not a comment — a move, a rename, a tick.
• Archived lists, and their cards with them.
• The second person on a card. Only the first one becomes the assignee.
• A label no card wears.
• Old comments. Trello’s export holds its last 1000 actions and no more. Nothing can bring back what is not in the file.

Archived cards are the one thing you choose. They stay behind by default; one switch brings them in, archived, where the archive page holds them.

Nothing twice

Every task an import makes gets one line in the feed naming the card it came from. The next import reads those lines first and leaves those cards alone.

So you can import the same file twice, or export the board again next week and import that: the cards you already have are counted as already here and the new ones are added at the end. The Import button says Nothing new to bring in when there is nothing.

It does not sync

A second import adds; it never updates. A card whose title changed on Trello after you imported it keeps the title it arrived with. Import is a move, not a bridge.

The limits

Limit	What happens past it
5 MB	That file is larger than 5 MB. An import takes 5 MB at a time.
2000 cards	That export has 2400 cards. An import takes 2000 at a time.

Both are answered before anything is written. Inside the limits the whole board goes in as one change: the task counter is raised once, the ranks that hold the card order are worked out in one spread rather than one at a time, the rows go in batches of 500, and the project is locked for the length of that — the reading of what is already here included. So an import can never leave a board half made, and two people pressing Import on the same file at the same moment still get one board: the second one waits, reads what the first wrote, and has nothing left to do.

What the rest of the board sees

Everybody looking at the board gets it at once, the way they get any other change.

A webhook rings once for the whole import, not once per card — two thousand deliveries for one press of a button is not an event, it is a flood. The ring carries the kind import and the project, and the receiver reads the feed for the rest, exactly as it does for everything else.

An agent gets nothing new. The page is the owner’s and the admins’, and an agent already hears the doorbell and reads /activity.

SettingsThe rail of settings pages, and what each one owns.