Earlier this year, we announced that Liveblocks Comments was entering private beta and have since collaborated with dozens of design partners to help shape the best product possible. Today, we're excited to open up Liveblocks Comments to everyone as a public beta.
Earlier this year, we announced that Liveblocks Comments was entering private
beta and have since collaborated with dozens of design partners to help shape
the best product possible. Today, we’re excited to open up
Liveblocks Comments to everyone as a public beta.
To try these Comments for yourself, create a Liveblocks account and get started
for free.
Each thread of comments can have metadata associated with it, providing enormous
flexibility. This means that, with Liveblocks Comments, you can embed a full
commenting experience into any product effortlessly—be it a text editor, a media
player, a whiteboard, a chart, a website. Or anything, really!
There are different layers of abstraction in which you can integrate Liveblocks
Comments within your product, depending on your needs and requirements. If you
use React, you can rely on versatile ready-made components, or pick-and-choose
primitives to compose a completely custom interface using components and styles
from your design system.
“Before finding Liveblocks Comments, we were anticipating having to try and build something similar ourselves. Not only does Comments do everything we were planning (and more!) but it’s extremely easy to implement and the support from the Liveblocks team has been first class. Brilliant.”
Andy WhyteCEO at MEDDICC
Here’s what the default React components look like in action—try it out, it’s a
live demo.
And here’s how this looks in code: Start by adding useThreads to receive the
threads in the current room, before adding the Thread and Composer default
components to render them and enable creating more.
The default components used above rely on primitives which you can also use
directly, should you wish to compose a fully custom user interface in a
pixel-perfect way. Here’s a primitives example, demonstrating how to build a
custom rich-text editor component that creates new threads.
Each action taken in Comments has a webhook event associated with it, for
example creating a thread, editing a comment, or adding an emoji reaction.
Combined with the REST API, they enable you to build powerful and fully
customizable notification flows. Whether that’s sending emails when someone’s
mentioned, firing a Slack notification, or integrating Liveblocks into your
current notification system.
Here’s a list of each Comments-related webhook event: threadMetadataUpdated,
threadCreated, commentDeleted, commentCreated, commentEdited,
commentReactionAdded, commentReactionRemoved.
To get started, you can also look at the
step-by-step quickstart guide for React. We
also have a few open-source examples for different comments use cases, including
the live demo posted in this article.
You can also try the Liveblocks Starter Kit for Next.js which
now includes a collaborative text editor with comments powered by Liveblocks
Comments.
We wouldn’t be here without the awesome work from
Olivier,
Marc,
Florent,
Nimesh,
Guillaume,
Adrien,
Chris, and
Pierre who’ve been working on this initiative
for nearly a year. We’d also like to thank our customers and design partners
who’ve been incredibly helpful with their feedback during the private beta
phase.