Add a "notes pane" to the edit screen

[phae]

User needs:

• a convenient place to see what's happened with a post over time, in context

As an MVP of basic discussion on PRs, add a panel to the side of the edit screen to house information.

For now, just list the major actions. See: https://phae.github.io/netlify-sketch/review.html (the coloured boxes in particular showing status changes) Commenting etc. can go in a seperate issue.

Acceptance criteria:

• User can click a link marked "Notes" from a tab menu above the preview pane.
• In most-recent-first order, a user can see who created the post first, who reviewed it and who published it.

[erquhart]

We should re-open this discussion based on the current CMS interface.

A few thoughts:

• Tracking history, notes, and status changes would be awesome!
• This can become valuable data for any serious organization - how can we make it redundant (able to be regenerated)
• How can we integrate this into the editor UI without being intrusive?
• We can probably roll Add notes for drafts #53 into this.

[mittalyashu]

What's the plan here: Will there be new notes for a new change or the note will be same for each item in the collections.

What I think, instead of adding some kind of option for note taking. There should be an option to write custom commit messages.

Reference: Commit Message Template

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[rdebeasi]

Not stale. Thank you!!

[erquhart]

Clarifying: this is basically a request for pull request comments to be readable/writable through the CMS for unpublished changes, with some additional info that's also available in pull request metadata from any Git host (Eg., who created it and when).

[sidag95]

Hi @erquhart, I just wanted to know what is the priority of this issue and whether the team is planning to pick this up anytime soon?

[erezrokah]

Hi @sidag95, this is not prioritized yet. If anyone would like to submit a contribution for it that would be great.

[sidag95]

Hi @erezrokah would love to contribute towards this. Will have a look at the Contributions guide. Apart from that, where should I start?

[erezrokah]

Thats great @sidag95. The contribution guide is a great start.

I would start by outlining the proposed UI changes in this issue, after that we would need to implement the comments/notes support in every backend (see https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/tree/master/packages/netlify-cms-backend-github for example).

[sidag95]

Got it. Let me look at the contribution guide and propose the UI changes first and take it from there. Thanks!

[sidag95]

Looking at all the features that can be supported by having a notes panel, I am proposing that we should start with a basic MVP that allows users to leave comments on each post. The MVP can looking something like below.

Once we have implemented this with all the backends, we should be able to extend this to support history, add reviewers and more.

Open questions

1. Should the notes panel respect i18n?

@erezrokah Does this make sense? How should we proceed from here?

[erezrokah]

Hi @sidag95, this is great progress 🎉

1. Should the notes panel respect i18n?

Yes, I think adding a i18n tab would be good.

@erezrokah Does this make sense? How should we proceed from here?

I would like to see an approach to implement this. I'm assuming PR comments, but making those look "realtime" can be a challenge. I know GitHub uses WebSockets for that, but it's not an official API. We could use polling/and or add a refresh button, we'll just to need to aware of performance and possibly services rate limits.

[sidag95]

Yes, I think adding a i18n tab would be good.

Okay, will check how the current i18n window looks like and make changes appropriately

performance and possibly services rate limits.

I believe this notes window doesn't need to be realtime. We can start with a large polling window and give a refresh button to the users so they have explicit control over the recency of notes/comments.

Let me setup some code and start a small PR. We can continue feature specific discussions there.

Thanks for the support @erezrokah!