Technical Changes Coming to Notes in Rock

A while back we added support for notes to be approved. The idea was driven by the thought that churches might want to allow comments to be left on public pages like blog posts driven by content channel items. In reality this never really took off, in part because 3rd party sites handling comments and discussions got so good at integrating with existing sites. This approval process adds a fair amount of complexity to Rock.

For those reasons the approval process will be removed from Rock. Starting in Rock v16, the approval status value of notes will be ignored. All notes will be displayed. To prevent notes that have been previously denied from showing up any Denied note will be deleted. Additionally, any Pending note of a note type that requires approval will also be deleted. A future version of Rock will remove the deprecated ApprovalStatus property from Note and the RequiresApproval property from NoteType.

Historically, the Notes block also provided a great deal of customization by using Lava templates to display the notes. That worked fairly well when notes were just a flat list of notes with no associated actions. But now you can edit, delete, watch and reply to notes. This has turned the lava template for notes into a rather chaotic mess of hacks to support all these features.

In Rock v16, the Notes block will no longer use a Lava template to render the notes. Instead the HTML will be determined by the block. You can still change a lot of the styles with CSS overrides, but you will not be able to change the structure of the HTML. This brings a number of important benefits, mostly around performance and the user experience. In the past, performing any action on a note would reload the entire block. The new block does not need to do that anymore. It simply makes the change in place.

Also in Rock v16, you will notice that the three color options for note types have been replaced with a single color. This color will be used to calculate an appropriate foreground and background color which are available for you to use in CSS to override how the notes look on screen. This is a new pattern you will see in new features of Rock.

Finally, along with these other changes in Rock v16, the notes text will be moving towards a more structured format. In the past, you were free to put anything you wanted. Some people have put rich HTML formatting in notes because it happened to work, although this was never intended. Moving forward, notes will have a much more structured format to the content saved in the note. This means if you try to store your own custom data in notes, it may get modified behind the scenes so that it conforms to the new format. Ensuring that notes have a structured content will allow us to provide additional rich features in the near future.