Whether you’re a team of five or fifty — as your organization grows, so does the number of projects, tasks, and priorities. At some point, work packages that once fit on one board become a sea of cards, and keeping focus becomes a challenge.
That’s why we created the Attribute highlighting feature: it helps you immediately see what needs your attention most. In this article, we’ll walk you through a relatable scenario and show how this feature can support you in staying focused and scaling successfully.
Important
Before February 2026, Attribute highlighting was part of the Enterprise edition in OpenProject. With the release of version 17.1, it is part of the free Community edition, because we value our Community a lot and aim to give “back” Enterprise add-ons to all users every few releases. You can find more information about this feature in our documentation.
You’ve grown — now it’s time to change how you work
Things might be going well. Your organization is growing. More clients, more projects, more team members. But with growth comes complexity. What used to be a simple backlog is now a multi-project list of dozens — maybe hundreds — of open tasks. And suddenly, you’re no longer sure what’s urgent, what’s blocked, or what’s been waiting for weeks.
Your system hasn’t changed, but your needs have. And that’s a good thing — because it means it’s time to invest in new ways to keep your growing team aligned.
Clean up your work package table by highlighting priority, status or finish date
Let’s take your team’s work package table as an example. Imagine you’ve filtered for this month’s deliverables — but the list is still long. You spot tasks with due dates coming up, some that are marked high priority, and one that was updated just now. But it takes a few minutes of scrolling and reading to get the full picture.
That’s where Attribute highlighting comes in. This feature allows you to visually emphasize specific values in your work package table using color: overdue tasks can turn red, high-priority items might stand out in orange, and different status values can appear in clearly distinguishable shades.
With just a glance, your team can now immediately see:
What’s overdue,
What’s marked as high or urgent priority,
What’s resolved or in progress.
How Attribute highlighting works
Let’s say your team uses the Priority attribute and a custom status workflow. You can highlight individual attributes inline (Status, Priority, Finish date) or apply full-row highlighting based on Status, Type, or Priority.
Once you’ve set this up in the work package table view, your team sees these visual cues automatically — without needing to open each task individually.
Tip
You can configure which colors are used for each priority and status in the System administration. Learn how to adjust them for priorities and for statuses.
Let’s look at an example work package table and how it looks with different attributes highlighted. Please note that you can change the colors for work package attributes and that they might look different in dark mode or light mode.
1. No attribute highlighting
Image 1: A work package table in OpenProject, no attributes highlighted.
2. Status, Priority and Finish date highlighted inline
Image 2: A work package table in OpenProject, with inline-highlighted Status, Priority and Finish date.
3. Highlighted by Status
Image 3: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Status.
4. Highlighted by Type
Image 4: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Type.
5. Highlighted by Priority
Image 5: A work package table in OpenProject, highlighted by Priority.
Other helpful features for prioritizing work packages
Attribute highlighting works best in combination with other prioritization features. Here are a few tools to support your growing team:
Status workflows
Define which status transitions are possible and by whom, helping structure review and approval processes.
Date alerts and reminders
Automatically notify assignees or watchers when a due date is approaching.
Versions
Group work packages under a common version to align delivery and deadlines across tasks.
Custom fields
Add structured information to work packages that you can then use for filtering, highlighting, or grouping.
Each of these features helps you bring structure to complexity — and together, they make it easier to stay focused.
Stay focused as you scale
Growth is exciting — but only sustainable if your tools grow with you. Features like Attribute highlighting can make a real difference: not by changing how you work, but by making it easier to see what matters.
With a growing team and more responsibilities, the ability to focus at a glance isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s essential. Let OpenProject help you take that next step.
In this release, we have restarted to focus on features. A long-awaited feature has been added, namely sorting articles by various criteria: received date (existing, default), publication date, title, link, random.
A few highlights ✨:
Add order-by options to sort articles by received date (existing, default), publication date, title, link, random
Allow searching in all feeds, also feeds only visible at category level with &get=A, and also those archived with &get=Z
In this release, the coding focus has been on moving to PHP 8.1+ and refactoring the integration of the SimplePie library (which was long due). At the same time, plenty of new features have been added. Enjoy! 🎄
Breaking changes 💥:
Require PHP 8.1+ (and improved support of PHP 8.4+)
Require PostgreSQL 10+ or MariaDB 10.0.5+ or MySQL 8+
⚠️ Advanced regex syntax for searches depends on the database used (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL),
but FreshRSS filter actions such as auto-mark-as-read and auto-favourite always use PHP PCRE2 syntax.
Allow dynamic search operator in user queries, like search:UserQueryA date:P1d
New feed mode HTML+XPath+JSON dot notation (JSON in HTML)
Better HTTP compliance with support for HTTP response headers Cache-Control: max-age and Expires
New unicity policies and heuristic for feeds with bad article IDs (reduce the problem of duplicated articles)
New option to automatically mark new articles as read if an identical title already exists in the same category
Add ability to remove content from articles with CSS selectors, also when not using full content
New condition option to selectively retrieve full content of articles
New UI feature to download a user’ SQLite database or a database SQLite export (to be produced by CLI)
⚠️ Advanced regex syntax for searches depends on the database used (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL),
but FreshRSS filter actions such as auto-mark-as-read and auto-favourite always use PHP PCRE2 syntax.
Allow dynamic search operator in user queries, like search:UserQueryA date:P1d#6851
New feed mode HTML+XPath+JSON dot notation (JSON in HTML) #6888
Better HTTP compliance with support for HTTP response headers Cache-Control: max-age and Expires#6812, FreshRSS/simplepie#26
Support custom HTTP request headers per feed (e.g. for Authorization) #6820
New unicity policies and heuristic for feeds with bad article IDs #4487, #6900
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