Allow text blocks to *not* be stored as notes

[Aaron Wells]

As described here: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=4827&offset=20&limit=10#post22473

Sometimes (perhaps more often than not!) you just want to put some text on a Page and you don't want it to be stored in a centrally-editable Note that shows up on your Notes list.

Often, as well, a user wants to copy some text that they've put on the page, but, again, not make it so that they've now linked together the two copies so that editing one also affects the other.

So, I propose we add a control to the Text block which indicates whether its contents should be stored as a Note or not. With the default being the creation of a one-off text block, rather than a centrally-editable note.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

As part of this functionality, when you delete a note from the Notes page, you should be able to leave its text as unlinked text in all the text blocks that are using it.

That should probably be the default behavior. In fact, I'm not entirely sure we even need to make it an option... although probably there is someone out there with a workflow that depends on the ability to remove a whole bunch of identical text blocks on many pages all at once.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

We were discussing this in this forum thread: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5647&offset=0&limit=10#post24312

That discussion made me envision a possible UI for this. We create two block types, one called "Text", and the other called "Note". The "Text" type will be for one-off text on the page, while the "Note" type will be a picker for your list of Note artefacts, and maybe also have a link to the standalone artefact page for that Note.

This way we could avoid a lot of tangly UI in the text block config screen, albeit at the cost of a little bit more blocktype clutter.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Identified as a usability priority by the Slovenian Mahara user group: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=6283&offset=0&limit=10#post26642

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Also under discussion by other Mahara users: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=6257

[Christian Rohrer (christian-rohrer)]

We also got several complains about this. The users want to create text elements/boxes without links in the title, ie. what you call "Text" above.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Discussed in today's dev meeting: The simple text blocktype should only have title and description / text. It is a simple blocktype for simple, short things.

Technically, they should probably be an artefact type as it might be a convenient way to store them. More info to come on that.

I think we should then have a way of migrating existing single “notes” to that blocktype when they have not yet been re-used to decrease the size of the notes dramatically.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

To think about: Would simple textboxes want to be shared in an activity stream / simple artefact sharing? Only because it's simple text doesn't mean that people won't use it for serious things they want to share. They simply just not want to re-use the text and thus not choose the re-usable note.