Project Templates in Omnifocus 2?

Hey Guys,

So I’m BRAND new to this whole Omnifocus setup, so I need some help. Search isn’t helping me at all.

I regularly do what is essentially “the same project”. In essence, I often need to create new projects, and they all have tasks that are due specific amounts of time after the project was created. So if I create Project X, I need the first task to be due a week after I created the project, Task 2 to be due 11 days after that, and so on. Is there a way for me to automate this?

If not - how not? It just seems like this is something that should be in a system like this…

Thanks!

OmniFocus doesn’t handle this directly.
If you have the Pro upgrade for OmniFocus 2, there are a number of AppleScripts for creating and managing “templates”. For example: http://www.curtclifton.net/journal/2014/4/6/scripts-for-omnifocus-2-for-mac.html

1 Like

As stated in the other comment, Omnifocus does not have a template function by default, but if you have the pro-version you can use Applescript to work with templates. I use the script created by Chris Sauve: [link no longer functional]

Does that setup work with Omnifocus 2? I’ve been trying to figure it out but I can’t seem to get it working. It seems to want Growl’s app location as well, which I don’t even use. Any ideas?

To solve the growl issue, if you download the script from the Github repository, you’ll find a ‘No Growl’ version of the script with the name templates-nogrowl.applescript.

Furthermore, you’ll have to save the script in the correct folder. The instructions on the site are still based on Omnifocus 1. For Omnifocus 2, one has to copy it to a different folder due to Apple’s sandboxing restrictions. You find a menu item “Open scripts folder” under the Help menu - just copy the script there and afterwards add it to the toolbar.

Thanks for all your help Jeroen.

I get this error now:

The operation couldn’t be completed. /Users/EttVenter/Library/Application Scripts/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus2/templates-nogrowl.applescript:5:6: script error: Expected end of line, etc. but found “<”. (-2741)

You should probably compile the script to a .scpt file using Applescript Editor.
If you have any further problems with the script, I suggest you post them to the project’s Github page as you’ll have better chances that somebody knows whats going on.

1 Like

It looks like this link http : / / cmsauve . com /projects/templates/ now redirects to a scammer site, although I use the scripts referred to here and really like them, but this probably should be removed. And people can get it from the github link now

As noted by @sdevore the link to Chris Sauve’s old site isn’t maintained anymore and points to a scam site, but he does maintain a Github, which you can find here: https://github.com/lemonmade/templates

Hi

I’m in the same situation as well. I will be looking into the Github project.

From what I understand, OF for iPhone now has template feature but it’s still not available on OF for Mac yet?

I’m using these templates, the main problem is that I want to target a folder to deploy the task once I’ run the script.

1 Like