Flowbase

Project Overview

Flowbase is a workspace-based collaboration tool for small teams — the kind of tool that sits between a task tracker and a shared notes board. Every user gets a personal workspace on sign-up, can belong to multiple workspaces (personal + team spaces), and switches between them from the sidebar.

Problem

Small teams often bounce between disconnected tools for tasks, notes, and scheduling. Flowbase's goal is to keep those three close together, scoped to a single workspace, without the overhead of a heavyweight project-management suite.

Solution

A workspace-first structure built entirely in Django: real authentication, Kanban task boards with drag-and-drop columns, a persistent Focus Wall for loose ideas, a real month-view calendar with notifications, and team management — every sidebar tab is its own Django URL/page, not a single scrolling view.

Key Features

• Real authentication: sign up / log in / log out with a custom Django User model; every new user automatically gets their own personal workspace.
• Multi-workspace support: belong to multiple workspaces, switch from the sidebar, and invite teammates by email.
• Teams: group members into teams inside a workspace and quick-assign a whole team to a task.
• Kanban task boards: create projects, drag & drop tasks between To do / In progress / Completed, set priority and due dates, assign teammates — saved via AJAX with no page reload.
• Focus Wall: a sticky-note board (drag, recolor, delete, auto-rotate) that persists every note's position, color, and text to the database per workspace.
• Calendar: a real month-view calendar tied to a workspace, with event invites and notifications for invited teammates.
• Notifications: task assignments, event invites, and workspace additions push to a bell-icon dropdown and a dedicated notifications page.
• Dark / light theme: instant toggle, preference saved per user.

Architecture

A modular Django project, split into focused apps rather than one monolithic app:

• accounts — custom User model, login/signup/settings, theme toggle.
• workspaces — Workspace, Membership, Team, Invite, and the dashboard.
• boards — Project, Column, Task, Comment: the Kanban logic.
• stickywall — the Note model behind the Focus Wall.
• events — the Event model behind the Calendar.
• notifications — the Notification model and bell dropdown.

Every feature is scoped to a workspace at the data layer, with server-rendered Django templates plus targeted AJAX calls (jQuery / jQuery UI) for drag-and-drop interactions that shouldn't need a full page reload.

Technology Stack

Engineering Highlights

• Workspace-scoped data model: every feature — tasks, notes, calendar, teams — is namespaced under a workspace rather than global, at the model level.
• App-per-domain structure: six focused Django apps instead of one monolithic app, each owning its own models, views, and URLs.
• AJAX where it matters: Kanban drag-and-drop and Focus Wall edits save without a page reload, while the rest of the app stays simple, server-rendered Django — no SPA framework overhead where it isn't needed.
• Production-aware persistence: ships with gunicorn, whitenoise, and dj-database-url so it deploys straight to Render with a provisioned Postgres database — deliberately avoiding SQLite in production, since most hosts wipe the filesystem on redeploy.

Results

Flowbase is deployed and publicly accessible as a working demo, seeded with a sample workspace, project, tasks, notes, and an event. No production usage metrics are published here.

Links