Orangescrum’s New Left Menu: Personalize Your Navigation

 

Every project management tool eventually runs into the same problem: the more it can do, the harder it gets to find anything. Orangescrum has grown a lot over the years – Programs, Projects, Epics, Backlog, Sprints, Resource Management, Advanced Analytics, Advanced Reports, and more all live inside the platform today. That’s a good problem to have, but it comes with a real cost. A sidebar that tries to show everything to everyone ends up being genuinely useful to no one in particular.

We’ve spent the last stretch of development time fixing exactly that, and the result is a completely rethought left menu. Instead of one fixed list of links that every user is stuck with, Orangescrum’s navigation is now something you shape around your own role and habits. A project manager who lives in Backlog and Active Sprint gets a different experience from an admin who spends most of their day in Users and Settings – and neither has to wade through menu items that don’t apply to them.

This post walks through everything that’s changed, why we built it this way, and exactly how to set it up for yourself in a couple of minutes.

The Problem With a One-Size-Fits-All Sidebar

If you’ve used Orangescrum for a while, you know the old left menu reasonably well – it was a long, mostly flat list of every module you had access to, in a fixed order, all the time. That works fine when a product has ten menu items. It works a lot less well when it has thirty.

The deeper issue wasn’t just visual clutter, though. It is that different people genuinely need different things from their navigation. A developer checking off tasks and updating status doesn’t need Resource Management sitting in their eyeline all day. A manager who lives in reports and capacity planning doesn’t need the Backlog details a developer cares about front and center. Forcing one static layout onto every kind of user meant everyone was scrolling past things they didn’t need to get to the things they did.
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