Drupal 7's preview functionality unfortunately took a dramatic turn for the worse. The preview takes place in the admin theme and there's no way to see what it will look like on the front-end site. http://drupal.org/project/panopoly gets around this by setting the front-end and back-end themes to the same theme, however, we have demonstrated evidence that the lack of front-end/back-end separation is extremely confusing to people.

Large Scale Drupal is working on tackling this through the Content Staging project, which uses a preview bar that can set certain session elements for browsing the entire site on a certain date or by tag, etc. Still in architectural phases currently.

Relevant Drupal 8 issue: #1510544: Allow to preview content in an actual live environment

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webchick’s picture

webchick
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Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
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wim leers’s picture

wim leers
Location Ghent 🇧🇪🇪🇺
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Quick addendum: inline editing (#1494628: Add inline editing to Spark) should of course solve the preview problem for content that's already published.

escoles’s picture

escoles commented

Not really, no. The "preview problem" is about seeing what stuff looks like before it's published. It's hard to see how inline editing really addresses that -- to claim that it does, you have to assume a number of things, e.g.:

  • the editing box substantially reproduces the page layout, which it's just not going to do if the layout of the content in that field is at all complex;
  • the page is not in some sense composite (e.g., the final page is comprised of multiple fields rendered as a single page [a pretty common scenario in drupal-land], reliant on filters to render elements like videos, or other rendered tokens).
wim leers’s picture

wim leers
Location Ghent 🇧🇪🇪🇺
commented

@escoles: I see what you're saying and fully agree! That's why I was specifically only talking about already published content. With the right editor, there won't be a need for "an editing box that substantially reproduces the page layout", which I agree is a big part of the problem. It has never been "true WYSIWYG". E.g. the Aloha editor could do this, see http://aloha-editor.org/demos/960-fluid-demo/.
But you're right, the composite/filters case is not addressed by this. However, that is near impossible to address through inline editing and is out of scope, I think — at least for now.

Jamie Holly’s picture

Jamie Holly commented

Actually this also exists in Drupal 6. If you set an admin theme and enable the option to use it for content authoring, then the preview also shows in the admin theme.

Probably the best approach I have seen so far out there is the way Wordpress handles it. You click the preview button and a temporary copy is made in the database and the preview post shows up on the actual site theme in a new tab. With UI in core, perhaps it could be improved upon by opening in a iframed dialog window. If no javascript is available, then it fallsback to the new tab/window method.

webchick’s picture

webchick
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Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
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Version: » 7.x-1.x-dev
Status: Active » Fixed
Issue tags: +Spark sprint 1

Cleaning out the queue. I'm going to mark this fixed, due to the inline editing capability of http://drupal.org/project/edit. escoles is correct that this isn't the whole enchilada, but it's a big part of it. Keep an eye on http://groups.drupal.org/large-scale-drupal-lsd-projects-and-plans/conte... for a much more robust solution to "the preview problem." We will probably look at incorporating this into Spark later on when it's ready.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

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Issue summary: View changes

Added a link to module page