Improved feature notifications

[thatoddmailbox]

Like #20 but a better system. The current notification system is limiting: messages are plain text bullet points, and, more importantly, it annoys users like crazy to have a red notification thing in the corner that cannot be dismissed until the expiration date.

[willbarkoff]

Adding planbot-ignore, because we're still figuring out how best to implement this

[willbarkoff]

Okay! I have a few ideas. Here are some features that I'd like to see included on this:

• [ ] Ability for admins to "approve" release notes, minimum approvement threshold before release notes can go live
• [ ] Users should be able to dismiss the release notes, and opt-out of them all together (like slack allows)
• [ ] Four sections in the release notes – a general discussion area, "new," "improved," and "fixed." The 1Password release notes implement this system, which works well.

In fact, the 1Password release notes look really good, I thought I'd drop a screenshot of them here:

The PartBolt release notes (cough @thatoddmailbox cough) implement a system similar to slack, which I think could work well for MyHomeworkSpace. Users see a simple notification dot by their name when there are updates, and clicking on it brings up a modal with updates.

These release notes appear to be pulled from a GitHub repository (PromptBit/updates), which is nice because they support markdown, but the approval system would be difficult to implement. It's possible that this could be done with pull request reviews, but keeping it version-control-hosting-site agnostic would probably be a good idea.

[thatoddmailbox]

The updates thing is centralized--so NoteToScreen and ShelfPage have the same thing:

(it looks slightly different because that apps have different styles, but it's the same code and repository)

Maybe I'm missing something, but is there a reason to have the whole approval system? It seems like it would add complexity. Why don't we just have a similar repository of markdown files (or some other source, https://blog.myhomework.space/ is empty but still works)?

(I would also prefer to keep the release notes out of the database since it makes it easier to keep the live site/staging2/local development in sync)

Also, I'm not totally sure how we want to do the actual content of the messages, in the sense that we don't really have versions with release notes like 1Password does, and it's just more of a continuous stream of improvements. This is also something I'm struggle with in NoteToScreen/PartBolt/ShelfPage--it feels too spammy to make a notification for every minor bug fix, so I only really do it for big new features, but I'm not really sure if that's the best way to do that.

[thatoddmailbox]

(also, who would even be doing the approval? The only people that are active on this (relatively speaking) are you, me, and sometimes @amazansky...having a whole process seems like a lot of overhead just for us?)