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Contextual Preview
Hello
I want to provide a “contextual preview” feature.
The idea is that an editor sets the status to “draft” or “pending” and can edit and create a story WITHOUT it appearing in any navs or lists on the public site .
The editor can then click on a “preview in site” link to open the article in the actual front end page.
What is the purpose of the stati “draft” and “pending”? Were they intended to facilitate something like this?
Are there any plugins which perform this function already(not found any so far)?
Can anyone give me any tips on this ( I’m an experienced PHPer with TXP experience) ?
Many Thanks
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Re: Contextual Preview
hi ollieclubb,
You can try doing the following:
1. create a section named “preview”. Configure it so it doesnt plublish to frontpage. Don’t make it publicy available, so search engines don’t reach to it. Or you can password-protect it.
2. configure also to use the same page template where articles will be finally published.
3. then, you can write the article but publish it first to the preview section, so you can see it in the front end page. Then you can publish it to the section it belongs.
I think this idea can be extended.
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Re: Contextual Preview
Hi Maniqui
thanks for your answer.
Yes I’ve already thought of this. But with 15+ sections and even more page templates the time to set this up will be quite high.
Not to mention that each time we add a new section or make changes to a page template the overhead to keep a preview up to date will be too high.
thats why I thought a preview plugin/mod would be the best idea. I’m just wondering the best way to go about programming this??
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#4 2006-06-24 18:34:32
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: Contextual Preview
Were they intended to facilitate something like this?
No.
What is the purpose of the stati “draft” and “pending”?
Draft is for unfinished articles. Pending is for articles that are done, a kind of “flag”, letting the editor know the article can be reviewed for publishing. Neither has any effect on the live site.
Yes I’ve already thought of this. But with 15+ sections and even more page templates the time to set this up will be quite high.
You just setup one extra section.
I do this myself, used along with ign_password_protect (the built-in tag password_protect only works for PHP running as module, and mine is running as CGI).
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