[Status: Investigating 🕵️‍♀️ - available in New Table View (Wrike Labs)] Custom sort order - Folders

I vote for custom sort too. People in this thread are correct, as project managers, we do not sort projects alphanumerically. Having to prefix tasks with a number is not feasible. When we need to add a task or changes the order of tasks etc having to update all the subsequent numbering is time-consuming. Without this feature, I am definitely thinking of moving on to another cloud project management tool. 

Hey guys, thanks for adding your votes and use cases! For now the feature suggestion is not planned by our Product team. I'll update the thread when I have any news on this.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

The fact we cannot drag and drop folders is silly. Having to use a number system or doing it alphanumerically is so antiquated it's ridiculous. It's not 1998... 

Please update. 🚀

Having the ability to drag and dropping would be great! 

Need this!

I'm sure it's only for the fact that people have gotten use to the hack of alphanumeric naming conventions that this doesn't have many more votes. 

It would be great if Wrike actually explained why something isn't on the roadmap.
Like this is not planned by our product team, because it is technically complex or this is not planned by our product team because not enough users have requested it. etc. 

Personally, I find it really frustrating when you have really simple functionality that would clearly update EVERY SINGLE USER, and it's been requested for near-on two years with no rationale for why it's not on the roadmap. *sigh*

We would like to be able to drag and drop as well. It's strange that Wrike doesn't have that capability; I agree with everyone else. 

I met Wrike years ago when it was brand new; before any other softwares that weren't even born yet. 

Wrike, you should be ahead of the game, guys.....

Hi everyone, I just wanted to pop in here to let you know that this is still not planned for now; I'll keep asking the Product team for updates regularly and I'll let you know if/when the status changes. Thanks for keeping this conversation going!

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

It is such a ridiculous answer! 😡

Still not planned to change? Are you sure? Are you guys working or playing?

How do you never listen the customers' opinion? Why do you make this customer feedback session?

Our company is hesitating to extend the number of users and subscriptions for the next year..because, it's not competitive anymore comparing with other PM tools.

So disappointed..

91 votes, and over 40 comments, and the best answer we've gotten is: "not yet." Like some others have said, I understand that Wrike has a roadmap in place and they are working toward those goals.  But in all the threads I've commented and voted on, not one of them has proved to be worth my time.  Just sad.

Sorry to pile on here but....

Can you point me to where anyone asked for "Spaces".  Because while ignoring this request to be able to properly organize our folders for years, you decided to implement spaces. Did it have as many people asking for it as this feature?

This terrible idea ("spaces") has completely changed my interface - now I have a PERSONAL space, which I don't need, and I cannot rename or delete it. All my folders have been moved and placed under a new header "shared with me" and I cannot change it back.  I cannot opt out of spaces.

Spaces seems to be a workaround for the fact that permissions don't work effectively because they were implemented incorrectly in the first place.

And so while we're still using the awful folder organization workaround where we have to number out our folders because we cannot effectively organize them any other way, I now also have spaces getting in my way.  

You realize that when everyone uses a numbering system to organize their folders, they are completely stuck when they need to add a new folder in because you have to manually renumber the entire structure. Which for some could be a monumental task. I imagine a lot of people are just bending to this and not making needed changes to their folder structure because the work involved in making the changes would be too great, and therefore they just resign themselves to working within a structure that simply doesn't work for them.  Because you suggested this work around and now they are too "invested" in the weak workaround to begin with.

Can you tell us why this folder feature is not on the list yet? 

Because my guess is the tech team made a decision long ago that technically prevents you from being able to implement it, but nobody wants to tell us that.  Everyone here surely assumes that is the reason, because if it was technically possible, you would do it.

May I ask why this is not being planned? This would be a really valuable feature for our team, but because we have to use this alphanumeric workaround, it discourages us from adding in some of our projects.

Min's comment highlights exactly what I said. 

The feeble workaround you tell everyone to just use number prefixes completely obliterates any usability in the product.  If you have to add a folder, and it requires you to rename EVERY FOLDER IN YOUR LIST, then that's not a real solution. In fact, it actually makes it feel like an incomplete product, that was incorrectly designed. And so you must wonder what large teams are doing when they are stuck UNABLE to actually add a folder. They literally, cannot get their work done.

But we have "spaces"....which no one asked for, which has taken over my interface, causes me to have to remove the default space from the folder section of EVERY task I create, without any way to setup what I want the default to actually be, and has left me with a new "space" called PERSONAL in my folder tree which I don't use, cannot rename or delete.

And the best part - you can't turn it off. Everyone gets "spaces" no matter how detrimental it is to your setup.

But you can't have the ability to sort your folders as needed to support your actual workflow...

@Wayne - Bitrix has told me they don't even offer the ability to group tasks in folders?

How has it been two years and this functionality is not present? I started at a new company that uses Wrike and I've wasted 2+ hours trying to figure out how to do a simple Prioritized Project + Prioritized Backlog to manage our advanced development project list, and the answer is to preprend text to the project name!?! JIRA has had this feature for 3+ years, and it's not even a very good project management tool.

Does your Product Management team use Wrike to manage the features they want to prioritize for each release? Make them try it and then maybe they'll add it to the next release.

Maybe...Wrike team doesn't know what is priority..because, there's no custom priority function in Wrike..They might be improving the program alphanumerically.😀

Hey Wrike,

Can you give us an update about this topic?

I have so much stuff on the menu and even by using numbers to sort it, the users are becoming very confused.

BTW, is this being discussed for two years now?

Thanks,

Rui

Hi Rui,

Sorry to disappoint, but this will never happen. unfortunately the way they have built the application, there is a technical limitation that will forever prevent this from being able to be possible.

This would be huge for us as well. Disappointing this is 'unfeasible'.

I too want to vote for this both in Spaces - do we need a separate request - and folders.  One of the best examples of how primitive this set up is can be found in this article:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001503625-Custom-sort-order-Folders

Under no circumstance should a recommended solution to solve a need be doing hacks like adding a "z" to something to force sort it!  Reminds me of when I did that in my Chart of Accounts in Quickbooks online back in 2006!

And numbering is also a terrible solution.  Bottom line, we should not have to manually figure out ways for the ordering to work.

@Jason, do you have any info from your rep or otherwise "inside" about this?  I think Wrike's devs need to step up and figure this out.  The likes of Clickup and other up-and-comers have this as a very basic functionality.  And even Confluence, one of the dinosaurs of the productivity space, allows you to drag and drop the Space hierarchy in the left pane to any ordering you desire. 

And I too would like to find out more about what Bitrix offers.  Do they have folders, or not?  Going to check myself and I will post if I find out anything, although @Jason again judging by your thoroughness I'm guessing you got this fully cased already...

My teams definitely need this drag and drop sorting feature as well!
I was very surprised to see this issue has been raised years ago and still not even planned.

We also struggle with sorting/ordering items, really need to be able to sort for our changing workflow. We really need this option.

Please fix the core issue of NOT having the ability to sort your folders and sub-folders by drag and drop. 

This should be CORE functionality. 

I build out projects and present them to the business and the first thing I always hear is "can you move that folder up or down". 

Numbering or adding an alphabetical value in front of a folder is an extremely poor design. 

What do I do if I add an 11th folder and need it in position 5? Put 1, 3, 5 in front of the original folders, or renumber the other 10 folders?  This does not help the business see the logical workflow and causes more work explaining or searching down multiple folders to show a folder that's setup for a specific task.  

How has this not happened already?! Not being able to reorder spaces, projects and tasks in the navigation pane its a huge and obvious flaw in the program that should have been picked up in development and has been subsequently raised by large numbers of people for well over 2 years with no solution. The numbering work-around is stupid and clearly not going to work, creating confusion for projects that have other staging and phasing considerations. Surely developers of software that's sole purpose is to assist with project management should be aware of this?! As a project manager of a sizable team and number of projects these kinds of flaws, lack of responsiveness and lack of customer awareness from a dedicated project management tool really concern me. I was looking at investing in subscriptions for the team, but think I'll need to start to look at other competitors

Fully agree, very alarmed these days at the amount of dissatisfied posters in here on basic features like this one - I cannot think of any tool that does not allow this as a fundamental feature.  You are right @david cowan that the workarounds cause lost integrity - if I want a space named "Development" that should be its name, not "3-Development."  Another poster recently brought up the point about why we got recently released "my inbox," basically just a retooled existing feature, and that that feature was nowhere to be found amongst the top request-getters in the community.

Wrike I'm sure will chime in here with some diplomatic excuse why this, and other basic features are not getting done, but we are not fools, and users will migrate away I'm sure as tools like Hive, Monday, ClickUp, Zenkit and the whole nocode group such as Airtable, Notion, Coda - who understand these needs - gain prominence.  It's time Wrike stepped up their game and blanket-implement a host of basic stuff that is sorely missing, or Wrike you will risk becoming irrelevant.

I'm surprised as well, but I will say what I've said before. I believe there is a technical limitation in the way the application was developed that is preventing this from being possible, for reasons I can't explain beyond that. this is a simple feature that has been requested for years, but we get things like spaces and my work instead. I believe that if they could implement tsis, they obviously would based on the comments in this post.

I can't understand how there is possibly a technical limitation - even if you went low-fi with an older style of edit order - with up/down buttons, and then save order - you could then add a hidden prefix that is calculated on save that is used for identical alphabetic ordering. Like I can't imagine how this couldn't be whipped up in a 24-hour hackathon.

Phil Sim and Jason Thayer Hey guys great stuff.  Jason to your point, the last response from Wrike is back in June, and if you look across the community at other popular posts for basic stuff that's fundamental to Asana, ClickUp, even Jira, the answers are few and far between as well.  I am concerned that with Wrike being an older product compared to much of the other stuff out there, that they are loaded with technical debt, and made some poor architecture decisions and we are stuck with them.  Wrike is riding one good decision I think in the product - ability to have unlimited hierarchy, and folders can bet both time-based (projects) or just containers (folders).  That in a nutshell is all Wrike offers me above and beyond any other tool, but those are such significant features that it brought me here.

But now that I'm on an expensive, annual paid license - that I might add I've only seen required by another dinosaur in the space - LiquidPlanner, which is on the verge of extinction - I expect more.  There is also a slew of functionality I was hoping to get that I'd have to pay for both Marketing and Integrate licenses, effectively quadrupling the already high cost per seat for my team.

I am really curious what the "product team" does on a daily basis.  Presumably it must be big given the size of Wrike's staff and worldwide offices, but from the point of view of an actual paying customer, next to impossible to see any real progress.  Even the iOS apps clearly have a more modern interface, one I'd welcome on the desktop version, but god knows when that's coming, if at all...

Al - agreed. We're thinking the same thing.

I understand that Wrike must balance many things while they are making these decisions, and some have long lasting effects.

There are many other things to like about the application as you have mentioned. For me it is the fact that I can have all of my lists in different folders and they offer a dashboard to pull them all together in filters that I need. of course we could just have saved filters in list view also, but we don't.

The killer feature for me is the dashboard. Most other apps really fail at that. For instance most of the no-code projects are pretty cool, but separate lists and databases are totally separate.