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Commenting

Overview

With Commenting, teams using your application can collaborate asynchronously on the same email, page or popup, in order to get their work done more quickly and reach approval for going live more efficiently.

When Commenting is enabled, your end-users (or contributors, as we’ll call them in this context) can:

  • Add a new comment in any content block or row, so that the context of the discussion is always visible;

  • Reply to an existing comment and start a thread;

  • Mark existing threads as resolved, and reopen solved threads if necessary.

  • Copy the text of a comment, and paste it back to the content area

  • Preview comments by hovering over the comment icon

  • Automatically highlight the row where a thread is posted

  • Receive a notification straight in the builder when a new comment is added during a co-editing session (Superpowers users only).

Use cases

With Commenting, you enable asynchronous, visual collaboration when multiple collaborators are creating, editing, and reviewing content in the Beefree builders. This collaborative feature can prove extremely beneficial in different contexts, regardless if contributors are in the same team, in separate teams, or even in different companies (e.g. digital marketing agencies collaborating with their clients):

  • have a single source of truth for feedback and requests on the content created with the builders;

  • cut time-to-publish, reducing back and forth conversations, both online and offline;

  • get sign-off for going live for email and web campaigns more efficiently.

How to activate it

Commenting – like most other features – is made available to Beefree SDK customers in an OFF state by default, and must be activated in the Beefree SDK Console.

To do so:

To activate Commenting when launching your Beefree application, you will need to pass a username, userHandle, and a userColor in the configuration parameters. See this example:

const beeConfig = {
    uid: 'dev-user',
    language: 'en-US',
    ...
    username: 'Test User',
    userColor: '#cae5f1'
    userHandle: 'd09b0f5d-e08b-4dca-b7ae-6010b5da04d3' // unique id
    ...
}

How it works

Adding comments and starting threads

When opening an email, a landing page or a popup, a contributor can add a new comment to a content block or a row by clicking the “Balloon” icon, available in two spots:

  • in the row or block outline, inside the editing stage

  • in the header of the Row properties or Content properties

Clicking one of these two icons will activate the commenting panel, which takes over the editor sidebar. From there, the user can insert a new comment. After the first comment, another contributor can start a thread by adding a second comment.

Mentioning someone in a comment

If you have implemented mentions, users can type @ to bring up a list of contributors and tag them in the comment. If the user starts typing, the list will be filtered If you’ve built a notification system around Commenting, you can use this piece of information to trigger a notification towards the mentioned person.

If you added a Content dialog for mentions, the action will be triggered by the button at the end of the list. You will define the CTA for this button as part of the Content dialog configuration (in this case, “Send an invite”).

Interacting with threads

If there has already been some activity, the editing stage shows whether a content block or row has any comments by displaying a small comment icon. The sidebar instead indicates the number of existing comments for the selected row or content block, three in this case.

Activating the Commenting panel will bring up the thread. In this case, it will show the three comments.

Existing comments can be edited or deleted by the contributor that added them. Contributors may also resolve comments when they have reached a consensus and completed any pending task.

Improved accessibility to in-line threads. Hover the mouse over the comment icon to see a preview of the last comment added.

Browsing threads and closing the commenting panel

Clicking on < All comments in the top section will bring up a list of all comment threads, indicating which ones have been resolved and which ones are still open. Contributors can search inside comments and filter out solved threads, or threads that were part of deleted content. Deleted and hidden comments will be filtered automatically.

To go back to the editor sidebar, contributors can close the Commenting panel by clicking the X icon in the upper right, or they can just click on another row or content block in the stage.

Quickly reopen resolved threads by adding a new comment, expand threads with a click, and show a comment thread preview straight from the content area.

Copy comment text and paste it to content area

Suggest edits in seconds, and save time with the copy/paste feature. Copy text from the comment body and paste it directly into the content area.

Real-time notifications when a new comment is added

If you subscribed to a Superpowers plan, and have co-editing enabled, your users will never lose a new comment again with the new notification system. Users will receive real-time notifications whenever a new comment is added to the document straight in the builder.

By clicking on the notification, they will be able to quickly open the comment, and highlight the element where the conversation is taking place. The toast notification can be styled with custom CSS to match your application look-and-feel.

If you want to learn how to implement co-editing in your application, check the related documentation article here.

The Reviewer Role

With the Reviewer role, you can now allow users to collaborate on your projects without changing the design. This role helps provide peace of mind by allowing inexperienced users to work with the team on their designs, without fear of accidentally changing it.

In short, this new role has the following characteristics:

  • Can’t apply changes to the message

  • Can add comments and start threads

  • Can edit their own comments

  • Can view other comments

This new role can be easily enabled by passing the following parameter in your configuration:

beeConfig: {
  role: 'reviewer',
  ...
}

Once you turn on the feature in the Beefree SDK Console, you may want to disable Commenting for some customers. You can do so via the client-side configuration document that you feed to your Beefree application when initializing the editor.

Why? Because you may decide to make the feature available to customers of your application:

  • depending on the subscription plan that they are on (i.e. you could push users to a higher plan based on the ability to use Commenting);

  • depending on the purchase of an optional feature (same);

  • only if they are “beta” customers, so they see it while keeping it hidden from the rest of your users.

Here’s how to do so:

  • Enable Commenting in the Beefree SDK console, as mentioned above.

  • Add the configuration parameter commenting to the beeConfig document

  • Set it to false for all users that cannot comment.

Here is a simple example:


const beeConfig = {
    uid: 'dev-user',
    language: 'en-US',
    ...
    commenting: false // boolean
    ...
}


 var beeConfig = {
  ...
  contentDialog: {
    ...
    getMention: {
      label: 'Send an invite',
      handler: userInput('Who do you want to mention?', {
        username: 'Jerry Doe',
        value: 'Jerry Doe',
        uid: "f6287c33-6e77-40cb-8a5d-66d62b4f38bb",
      })
    },

Managing notifications

You can build a notification system around commenting by triggering a callback for events in the Commenting layer. When these events happen, the Beefree system triggers the onComment callback.

You can react to that callback by taking the information provided in it (e.g. the user that created the comment, the text of the comment, any mentioned user, date & time of the comment, etc.) and send notifications.

You are free to define:

  • which events will trigger a notification

  • how it is sent (e.g. Email, In-app, Slack, etc.)

  • what exactly it says

Again, remember that the Beefree platform only triggers the callback, and it’s up to you to react, if you want. Below you can find the technical details on the comments schema and the onComment callback.

Sample code for email notifications

We’ve put together a sample code that illustrates how to send email notifications, triggered by a mention in a comment. This code shows how to:

  • Define an array to hold the list of mentioned users in the comment payload.

  • Loop through the comment payload and add any strings matching a regex to the array

  • Compare each value in the array with the ‘handle’ property of each user (as defined by the host application), to grab the active users

  • Loop through your array and pull the respective email address for the handle matches (for use in notifications)

  • Send the notification through email (via ajax), slack, etc… (you decide and implement how to send the notification)

The following JSON is saved as part of the template:


"comments": {
    "aab0227f-766d-439d-b3d9-8bf7d04d551f": {
      "content": "Here is a comment",
      "parentCommentId": null,
      "elementId": "ab35241d-dd69-4980-9385-862fedd094e4",
      "responses": [
        "84f11738-a5a2-49db-956a-ae95b4d1db67"
      ],
      "timestamp": "2020-09-07T13:58:43.147Z",
      "author": {
        "userHandle": "abfb7e82-3b9a-45fc-a40d-b22221f6a7f5",
        "username": "Test User",
        "userColor": "#dddddd"
      },
      "isElementDeleted": false
    },
    "84f11738-a5a2-49db-956a-ae95b4d1db67": {
      "content": "Here is a second comment",
      "parentCommentId": "aab0227f-766d-439d-b3d9-8bf7d04d551f",
      "elementId": "ab35241d-dd69-4980-9385-862fedd094e4",
      "responses": [],
      "timestamp": "2020-09-07T13:59:51.954Z",
      "author": {
        "userHandle": "d09b0f5d-e08b-4dca-b7ae-6010b5da04d3",
        "username": "Test User B",
        "userColor": "#cae5f1"
      },
      "isElementDeleted": false
    }
  }

You may want to save multiple copies of a template, e.g. to create a history/revision or a draft feature.

In such cases, you may decide to store the comments in a database, and add the schema back to the template when it’s loaded. Alternatively, you can keep the comments inside the template, and it will become a static part of the history.

Comments can also be added dynamically, but it’s an advanced task, which requires matching the comment schema to the target content by its “elementId”.

Commenting Callback

When a thread or comment changes, the Beefree system triggers the onComment callback. The callback returns the following details:

change

  • JSON contains all the details on the change

comments

  • JSON array of the entire comments schema, as described in the previous section.

threadUsers

  • JSON contains the contributors array with all users in a thread.

Change Schema

type

  • NEW_COMMENT

  • COMMENT_THREAD_RESOLVED

  • COMMENT_THREAD_REOPENED

  • COMMENT_EDITED

  • COMMENT_DELETED

payload

JSON contains all the details of the change

Example of new comment payload


{
    "change": {
        "type": "NEW_COMMENT",
        "payload": {
            "commentId": "a2c555e4-72f7-4e7f-96cd-537e5eb2069c",
            "comment": {
                "content": "add new Text block and logo here!",
                "parentCommentId": null,
                "elementId": "73dcc71b-1ba7-458d-81b8-59ec54e534a5",
                "mentions": [],
                "responses": [],
                "timestamp": "2022-04-05T13:53:28.089Z",
                "author": {
                    "userHandle": "0.6379069806343958",
                    "username": "John Doe",
                    "userColor": "#ff4400"
                }
            }
        }
    },
    "comments": {
        "a2c555e4-72f7-4e7f-96cd-537e5eb2069c": {
            "content": "add new Text block and logo here!",
            "parentCommentId": null,
            "elementId": "73dcc71b-1ba7-458d-81b8-59ec54e534a5",
            "mentions": [],
            "responses": [],
            "timestamp": "2022-04-05T13:53:28.089Z",
            "author": {
                "userHandle": "0.6379069806343958",
                "username": "John Doe",
                "userColor": "#ff4400"
            }
        }
    },
    "threadUsers": {
        "contributors": [
            {
                "userHandle": "0.6379069806343958",
                "username": "John Doe",
                "userColor": "#ff4400"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Adding mentions

You can activate a mention dialog for comments by adding a data source to the Beefree application configuration. You can use the “Hooks” data source method to fetch data from your application and pass it to the Beefree system in real-time.

To configure a hook data source, define the hooks section in your bee config and implement the getMentions method.


var beeConfig = {
  ...
  hooks: {
    getMentions: {
      handler: async (resolve, reject, args) => {
        const mentionedPeople = [{
          "userColor": "#FF5733",
          "username": "John Doe", // Displayed in dialog
          "value": "John Doe", // Inserted mention value
          "uid": "11c8482f-c05d-4480-9861-6d5c64ffbc4a"
        }, {
          "userColor": "#74FF33",
          "username": "userdef5678",
          "value": "Jane Doe",
          "uid": "ed43043f-1c15-4133-bedb-e78efb69e0ba"
        }]
        let filtered = mentionedPeople
        if (typeof args === "string") {
          filtered = mentionedPeople.filter(item => item.username.toLowerCase().includes(args.toLowerCase()))
        }
        resolve(filtered)
    }
  },
  ...

You can also extend the default mention dialog via Content Dialog. For example, you can enable end-users to to invite an external user not available in the data source.

To configure a hook content dialog, define the contentDialog section in your Beefree application configuration and implement the getMention method.


var beeConfig = {
  ...
  contentDialog: {
    ...
    getMention: {
      label: 'Send an invite',
      handler: userInput('Who do you want to mention?', {
        username: 'Jerry Doe',
        value: 'Jerry Doe',
        uid: "f6287c33-6e77-40cb-8a5d-66d62b4f38bb",
      })
    },

You can generate a link to a specific comment, which can be used to notify the user. Common use cases include sending a link via email, Slack, API, or via in-app messaging. To implement this action use the onComment callback combined with a new instance method called showComment.

Here’s how it works:

The onComment callback contains the comment’s id and a new section called “mentions” containing an array of mentioned users’ uid values.


  "mentions": [
    "45b9cdd1-60af-4235-ac9f-ddcb7b07a9e0",
    "04b3a1a3-ab04-46f7-b03b-e651357b54ab"
  ],

With the uid, your application can look-up the user’s contact details. The Beefree platform does not track any sensitive information, such as user emails!

Similarly, since mentions can trigger events and the uid can generate notifications, you can match uid to userHandle.

Next, using the comment’s id, your app can generate a link back to the email containing the comment. The new showComment instance method can be invoked from Beefree’s onLoad callback to send the user directly to the comment as soon as the editor is fully loaded and ready.

Note: In the sample below, getParameterByName is a function that takes the commentId from the browser’s URL query string.


onLoad: function () {
  bee.showComment(getParameterByName('commentId'))
},
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