Boards & State
Where state lives, and why it belongs on the row rather than in the process.
Lanes are a column's options
A board groups rows by a dropdown column. There is no lane list to author or keep in sync — add an option to the column and the board grows a lane. A board over a text column has no lanes, and says so rather than rendering empty.
- Set which column is the card's title and which appear on its face.
- Rows whose column is empty appear in a "None" lane, so they are visible rather than silently dropped. It is not a drop target — clearing a state is not a thing anybody drags to do.
- Filter a board like any other block: an Orders board can show only the rows that have reached PO Issued.
Gates
A gate stops a card leaving a lane until a checkbox on the row is ticked — a deal cannot leave Proposal until somebody has logged that the proposal was sent. A gated card simply is not draggable, with the reason on it, rather than being picked up and refused on drop.
State is a column, not a Step
This is the pattern worth copying from the shipped templates. The state of a thing — an asset's life, a deal's stage, an order's fulfilment — is a plain dropdown column on the row that a person moves.
That is why a deal can slip back from Negotiation to Proposal, why an asset can come out of retirement, and why an order can go backwards when a delivery is short — none of it needs a Flow to be re-authored, because none of it was ever a Step in one.
Flows attach behind those columns. Enter a discount above ten per cent and an approval starts; the answer is written back onto the row, so the board and the decision are one fact rather than two that drift.