Adding Due and Start Dates for Populate Template Placeholders
 

I love the Populate Template Placeholders script, but I haven't been able to figure out how to put in start and due dates that are relative to each other and that change with the due date entry.

For example, I have a template for receiving, editing, and posting articles from freelancers who work for me. I need to set a publish date, which is the project due date. I need to set a start date to ask the writer for the piece (i.e. their due date) that is three days before the publish date. Then I need to set a date to check on the status of the piece with the writer, which would be three days before I ask for the piece from the writer. So this is something like:

Due Date (Publish Date)
Start date to ask for piece from writer: Due date -3d
Start date to check on status of piece with writer: Start date to ask for piece from writer -3d

Can you tell me how to do this? When I fill in the dates with the +/- days, it changes it relative to today. Is that right? Can someone also show me a screen shot of what their project template looks like with multiple conditional due and start dates?

Thanks!

It's easier than you think: you just make your template with real dates. The script does the math to figure out the deltas and apply them to the new project. Might want to check its work if your project (either the template or the new one) happens to span Feb. 29, as I don't recall seeing any code to handle that case :-) Also note that it doesn't have any notion of which days are normal work days and which are not, so a project which has an action happening 4 days after the start which needs to be done on a weekday will put that task on a weekend day if you start the project on Tuesday or Wednesday, for example.

Does that clear it up?