The Five Categories
You can create as many individual statuses as you need, but every status belongs to one of five categories. The categories are fixed. You cannot add or remove them, but you can create multiple statuses within each one.
Categories exist so Cartographer can tell where a card is in its lifecycle, no matter what you have named the status. Whether your “In Progress” equivalent is called “Building,” “Active,” or “In Development” does not matter. As long as it is in the In Progress category, Cartographer knows the card is being worked on.
- Backlog: Not yet prioritized
- Todo: Ready but not started
- In Progress: Currently being worked on
- Completed: Finished
- Canceled: Will not be done
Custom Statuses
Each category can contain multiple named statuses. This is where you adjust the workflow to match how your team works. Some examples:
- Backlog might have “Icebox” and “Someday/Maybe” to distinguish between low-priority items and things you might never do.
- In Progress might have “In Development,” “In Review,” and “QA” to reflect a multi-stage delivery pipeline.
- Completed might have “Done” and “Shipped” if your team distinguishes between finished work and work that is live in production.
Each status gets a name and a color. The color is used in status badges on cards and in progress bar segments, so pick something that makes the status easy to identify at a glance.
The order of statuses within a category matters most for the In Progress category. Statuses earlier in the list represent earlier stages of work, and statuses later in the list represent later stages. Cartographer uses this order to show partial progress on status icons. A card that is “In Review” appears further along than one that is “In Development.”
How Statuses Drive Milestone Progress
Each milestone on your board displays a segmented progress bar. The bar shows a colored segment for each status category that has cards in that milestone, sized proportionally to how many cards are in each category.
MCP Tools
Manage and query statuses programmatically through the MCP server:
spaces_statuses_list. List all statuses for a space, including their names, colors, and categories.
When creating or updating cards via MCP, you can set a card’s statusId to any status defined in the space. Use spaces_statuses_list to discover available statuses before assigning them.
