Hey Guys,

I have documented and released a new extension called LG Live Look!

LG Live Look is an ExpressionEngine extension that adds a new ‘Live Look’ tab to the publish/edit form in the control panel. The tab contains a preview of the last saved version of an entry, which can quickly be updated using the ‘quick save’ button.

LG Live Look also adds a link to the edit entries table for each entry row. The source of the tab content and the target of the link can be easily customised in the extension settings using a subset of standard {ee} template tag variables (a full list can be found in the documentation).

There’s also an accompanying tutorial on how to setup your templates on the Newism blog so make sure you read that as well.

As always if you have any feedback or suggestions leave them as a comment below.

If you really like the extension, blog about it or share it on your favourite social network!

Enjoy.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Caveats:

LG Live Look may conflict with some of my other LG extensions. Until I can get a fix out the problem is fairly easy to fix.

In your extensions folder do a global find replace:

Find:

Replace with:

Upload your extensions directory and your done.

Great job!

Thanks bkuberek,

Let me know if you have any issues with it!

Cheers Leevi

Hi Leevi,

Sounds great this one, well done. Will try this one out a bit later on, looks like it will really help out a few clients

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Leevi,

Don’t know if it’s just me or the fact that I am working on a localhost installation but I found that I had to place :

http://localhost:8888/lgtest/index.php/lg/index/{url_title}

into the settings instead of just /blog/post/{entry_id}/{url_title} as your post here indicated.

Also do you really need the {entry_id}/{url_title} in the settings as this may cause an error wouldn’t it. Shouldn’t you really just use one or the other (entry_id or url_title) just like you would in a real world example?

One other thing I noticed in your blog post was that it says :

2 Set the status to ‘Live Look’

but you had stated above that you had made a Pending status. I think maybe you meant Pending in the instruction line too didn’t you?

Anyway got it working and it looks nice so thanks for that one.

Best wishes,

Mark

I am a pain aren’t I

I just went and made a second weblog and went into the extensions settings page and got this error at the very top of the page :

Notice: Undefined index: 2 in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/lgtest/admin/extensions/ext.lg_live_look_ext.php on line 563

Not too sure why that is though? Any thoughts?

Best wishes,

Mark

Edit Remove the extra text. Look here for MAMP setup

That’s unfortunately all a bit over my head to tell the truth

Sounds interesting though. Is there any material on the internet about how to do this? If there is then a link would be great thanks as I don’t want to take away from Leevi’s thread if I can help it.

Best wishes,

Mark

sorry I was writing this wiki so I could edit my post before you read it. I was not fast enough. Here is the wiki: MAMP setup

OMG Leevi, you’re a fast shooting extension pistol.

Gonna try this out later today, thanks!

This looks great! Is it MSM compatible?

Tested this extension on both my local development environment and on our production server. There were no errors.

This extension adds great value to the publish page. Our editors will greatly appreciate it.

It would be great to be able to see entries that have not yet been saved or that are closed. This is something that would really make a difference. I think that could be achieved by getting the template from the DB and parsing the tags on the fly instead of ajax loading the page into an iframe.

Nevertheless, this is great piece of script.

Thanks for all your great extensions.

quick question: Should I download jquery or can I rely on the external link that is set by default?

I can’t figure out how to get this to work with EE static pages. Especially since you can choose the template in the publish screen. Any ideas?

I believe this will only work when all the entries for the specific weblog have a common template. If you are using the pages module, every post could have a different template. This extension will not work with that since you have to choose your template per weblog and not per entry.

Leevi, please correct me if I am, wrong.

bkuberek - 09 October 2008 08:02 AM

It would be great to be able to see entries that have not yet been saved or that are closed.

I already answered my question by reading your blog entry on newism.com.au

Having some trouble getting this to work.

Everything seems to work except for getting my 404 Error page template in the live look preview?

I’ve enabled the display tab for one of my weblogs and entered in the entry URL path as:

and all I get is the 404 page.

Also, your documentation link inside of the LG Live Look settings page seems to be broken:

If you enjoyed this addon please bookmark it, write a blog post or link to the documentation!

That documentation link just refreshes the settings page that I’m currently on. Maybe that’s something on my end though?

It COULD work if the variable for the static page URI was available in the Live Look settings. I believe all this extension is doing is just showing the site in an iframe. So if we were able to use that static page URI as a variable it SHOULD pull up the page in the correct template.

This is all just an educated guess though… Levi?

james Brown - 09 October 2008 02:48 PM

It COULD work if the variable for the static page URI was available in the Live Look settings.

The problem here is that in the extension settings you only have one option. Using the pages module you can set the content to any template under the pages tab. I don’t think this would work but it gave me an idea:

In the Extensions settings, the chosen uri/url will be the default, while in the Live Look tab, there is the option of overwriting the default.

In other words, when you first install the extension, the url/uri input text under the extension settings is the default value for that weblog. While creating or editing an entry, one have a text field above the Live Look iframe. This text input shows the default value for the weblog but you can override it by editing it. It will then be saved with the entry itself, so next time editing the same entry, it already knows the url for the given entry.

This means modifying the extension quite a little. Only Leevi can say how much work that would be and if it is worth it.

I don’t believe this is accurate.

All you would have to do is set in your live look settings: http://www.domain.com/{page_uri}

Then whatever template you have set and whatever URI will work with Live Look. We just need to have support for the {page_uri} variable in the settings.