Dashboard Notes

Keep what your team must not forget right where they start their day, with colour-coded sticky notes on the Blesta staff dashboard.

What it does

Important reminders, handover instructions and one-off priorities get lost in email threads and ticket comments, so they never reach the staff member who actually needs them at the moment they log in. Dashboard Notes puts a sticky-note board directly on the admin home dashboard, so anything your team must not forget is the first thing they see. Notes can be kept personal or shared with the whole company, colour-coded so urgent items stand out from routine ones, and reordered by hand so the most important note always sits on top.

Key features

• Sticky Notes on the Staff Dashboard: A dashboard widget shows your stickied notes as colour-coded sticky notes with their date and title, so reminders, handover instructions and current priorities are the first thing your team sees when they log in.
• Personal or Shared With the Whole Team: Mark a note global to share it with every staff member, or leave it personal so only you see it. One widget covers both your own reminders and team-wide announcements.
• Six-Colour Colour Coding: Give each note a colour from a yellow, blue, green, pink, orange and purple palette so urgent, informational and routine notes are told apart at a glance, on the widget and in the full list.
• Put Notes in the Order You Want: Move any note up or down to control exactly which notes sit at the top of the dashboard widget, instead of being stuck with the order they were created in.
• Stick and Unstick Without Losing Anything: Unstick a note to clear it off the dashboard while keeping it on file, and stick it again whenever it matters. Nothing has to be deleted to tidy up the widget.
• Full Sortable Notes List: A paginated All Notes screen lists every note you can see with its colour, stickied and shared status and its added and updated dates, sortable by column, with edit and delete on every row.
• Per-Staff-Group Access Control: Viewing the widget, viewing all notes, creating, editing, unsticking, reordering and deleting are each separate permissions you grant per staff group, so you decide which teams can post team-wide notes and which can only read them.
• Separate Notes For Each Company: On a multi-company install every note stays with the company it was created in, so brands never see each other's dashboard notes.

Contact Us

If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improving the plugin, please get in touch with us. We are committed to providing robust updates and welcome customer feedback.

Installing Dashboard Notes

Before you start

• If you are on the leased (subscription) licence, the Blesta Club Subscription Manager must be installed and your subscription active. The owned and owned-source licences have no such requirement.

1. Upload the files

Upload the extension folder into your Blesta installation so it lands under your Blesta directory at:

plugins/dashboard_notes/

For example, on a typical install: /var/www/html/blesta/plugins/dashboard_notes/

2. Install it in Blesta

1. Log in to your Blesta admin area with a staff account that has the Plugins permission (with Install Plugin) under the Settings group in Manage Staff Groups.
2. Go to Settings > Company > Plugins and click the Available tab.
3. Find Dashboard Notes in the list and click Install. It installs immediately - no further confirmation step - and you're returned to the Installed tab, where Dashboard Notes now appears with Settings, Disable and Uninstall links.

3. Configure it

Dashboard Notes has no settings of its own to configure - there are no API credentials, cron tasks or webhooks to set up. Two short steps get it in front of your staff:

1. Grant the permissions. New permissions register unchecked for every staff group, including Administrators. Go to Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups, edit each group that should be able to use Dashboard Notes, and under the Dashboard Notes permission block tick the ones that group needs: View Dashboard Notes Widget, View All Notes, Create Note, Edit Note, Unstick Note, Reorder Notes and Delete Note. Save the group.
2. Add the widget to the dashboard. The widget is not placed automatically - open the admin home Dashboard, click Manage Widgets, and drag the Dashboard Notes card from the available column on the right into your active column on the left. It will show "There are no stickied notes to display" until your team adds its first note.

You're ready to go - see the usage guide for a walkthrough of day-to-day use.

Updating Dashboard Notes

Upgrading works just like installing: upload the new files over the old ones, then run the upgrade from the same page you installed it on.

1. Back up your current extension files first - good practice before any upgrade.
2. Upload the new version over the existing folder, replacing the old files.
3. Log in to your Blesta admin area and go to Settings > Company > Plugins.
4. Find Dashboard Notes on the Installed tab and click Update to run the upgrade.

Version-specific notes

• Version 1.1.0: Adds staff permissions, and scopes notes to the company they belong to. Blesta registers the new permissions without granting them to anyone, so immediately after this update the Dashboard Notes widget is hidden from every staff group - including Administrators - until you grant it. Go to Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups, edit each group that should have Dashboard Notes, tick the Dashboard Notes permissions, and save. This update also assigns each existing note to a company: personal notes go to the company of the staff member who owns them, and Global notes (plus any note whose owner can no longer be determined) go to whichever company runs the update first - on a multi-company install you may need to recreate a small number of Global notes for your other companies.
• Version 2.0.0: Adds a colour to every note (existing notes default to Yellow) and manual ordering via Move Up / Move Down controls on the All Notes list - your existing notes are given a starting order automatically, and new notes are added to the end. This version adds one new permission, Reorder Notes, which is registered the same way as the 1.1.0 permissions - unchecked for everyone. After updating, go to Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups, edit each group that should be able to reorder notes, tick Reorder Notes, and save.

Keep your Dashboard Notes plugin up to date to make sure your team has the latest features and fixes.

Contact Us

If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improving the plugin, please get in touch with us. We are committed to providing robust updates and welcome customer feedback.

Using Dashboard Notes

Dashboard Notes is a staff-only tool - your clients never see it. Everything below happens in the admin area.

For your staff

The Dashboard Notes widget

Once the widget has been added to the home Dashboard (see the install guide), it shows every note that is stickied and visible to the logged-in staff member - their own personal notes plus any note marked Global - as a stack of colour-coded sticky notes, each showing its last-updated date and title (for example "Aug 13, 2026 - Renew wildcard SSL certificate"). Click a note to open it for editing. Hovering over a note reveals an Unstick control that clears it from the widget without deleting it. The widget carries two buttons in its top-right corner: Add Note and View All Notes.

Adding a note

Click Add Note (from the widget or the All Notes list) to open the Add Note form:

• Global - tick this to share the note with every staff member in the company. Leave it unticked to keep the note personal, visible only to you.
• Title - required. Shown on the dashboard widget alongside the date.
• Description - the body of the note, shown on the All Notes list and when editing.
• Colour - choose from Yellow, Blue, Green, Pink, Orange or Purple to colour-code the note on the widget and in the All Notes list.
• Stickied - tick this to have the note appear on the dashboard widget. Leave it unticked to keep the note on file without it showing there.

New notes are added to the end of the manual ordering. Submitting the form redirects you back to the widget.

Editing a note

Click any note on the widget, or Edit on its row in the All Notes list, to open the same form pre-filled with its current values. A shared (Global) note can be edited by anyone with the Edit Note permission, but only the staff member who created it can untick Global to make it personal again - anyone else trying that gets an error explaining why, and their other changes are not lost, just not saved yet.

The All Notes list

Click View All Notes on the widget to open a full, paginated list of every note visible to you, with columns for Position, ID, Title, Colour, Stickied, Global, Date Added and Date Updated. Click any column heading to sort by it. Each row has Edit and Delete links; Delete asks for confirmation first.

Reordering notes

When the All Notes list is sorted by Position (its default sort), each row also shows a pair of up/down arrow buttons. Click them to move a note earlier or later in the order - this is what controls which notes appear nearer the top of the dashboard widget. The arrows are hidden when the list is sorted by any other column, since reordering only makes sense against the manual position order.

Unsticking and deleting

Unstick (from the widget) clears a note off the dashboard while keeping it on file in the All Notes list - use this to tidy up the widget without losing anything. Delete (from the All Notes list) removes the note permanently and cannot be undone.

Good to know

• Notes are scoped per company on a multi-company install - staff in one company never see another company's notes.
• Unsticking a Global note clears it from the dashboard for every staff member who can see it, since it is one shared note rather than a separate copy per person.
• Viewing the widget, viewing the All Notes list, adding, editing, unsticking, reordering and deleting are each separate permissions, granted per staff group under Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups.