Labels

Tag tasks with cross-cutting categories, and rename them to your own vocabulary with the Label Customizer.

Labels are free-form tags on tasks. Unlike status and priority — where a task has exactly one value — a task can carry several labels at once.

They are the Community Edition's only extensibility point for categorising work, since custom fields and custom statuses are commercial features.

#Using labels

Add them from the task page. Filter by them in the task list and on the Kanban board.

Labels that earn their place:

🚧State that isn't status

blocked, needs-review, waiting-on-customer — real states that are not Open or Closed.

📥Origin

customer-reported, tech-debt, regression.

🗺Area

frontend, api, infra — useful when a project spans several surfaces.

⚖️Effort

quick-win, spike — where a full estimate is overkill.

#Label Customizer

The LabelCustomizer plugin — one of the few feature plugins that ships with this edition — lets an admin rename labels to match how your team actually talks. If you say "ticket" rather than "task", or "epic" rather than "milestone", you can change the wording without touching code.

Note

Renaming changes the display text. It does not add new label types or change behaviour.

#Keeping labels useful

Label sets rot faster than anything else in a tracker. A few rules keep them worth having:

Keep the list short
Ten labels people use beats fifty they ignore. If you cannot remember the list, it is too long.
Agree what each one means
blocked should have one definition, not one per person. Write it down.
Don't duplicate status or priority
An urgent label alongside an urgent priority guarantees they disagree.
Prune regularly
Retire labels nobody has applied in months.

Deleting a label removes it everywhere

It is stripped from every task that carried it, and there is no undo. Check what is using a label before removing it.

#Labels versus milestones

Use a label	Use a milestone
Cross-cutting, many per task	Delivery point, one per task
`frontend`, `blocked`	"v2.1 release", "Client demo"
No dates	Has a date

👥Next: users and roles

Inviting people and what each role can do.