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When adding/editing a weblog entry it shows a text based preview of the output, how can I show a preview in the context of the actual site?

anyone?

Do you have your templates setup to pull in the weblog data?

yes, we have templates for the design which outputs the weblogs

To preview the weblog data in the form of the actual site, you’d preview the templates.  It’s the templates plus the weblog data that actually make up the site.

After reviewing your question a second time and visiting the control panel to take a look, I see your desire.  I don’t know of a way to preview the entry after submitting it.  The only way I know would be to navigate to the entry after viewing the template and/or site.

the main issue is that they want to see what the site will look like before publishing it

Off the top of my head, you could…

- set the entry date into the future
- set the template for the live site to not show future entries
- setup a template for previewing with a parameter set to show future entries
- preview the template for previews
- once everything looks good, set the date of the entry to the present

Man, as I type this, it seems like there has to be a better way.  Maybe I’m not thinking clearly at the moment, but that’s all I can think of.

I’d say a better option would be to add a custom field for a status on whether it’s published or not.  Have an extra template like Stephen lists that shows even the unpublished entries for preview purposes. 

Short of rewriting the code that generates the preview in cp.publish.php I don’t see a better way at the moment.

its a bit of a pain considering the number of templates and weblogs we have to recreate the entire site (and edit two sites if we want to change one thing)

Yeah, I could see that being a pain.  Before I’d recreate the site for previews, I’d set up a duplicate testing (dev) site.  This would allow you to get things looking like you want before pushing the changes to the production (live) server.

After looking a little further, there is an extension hook called publish_form_preview_additions that could possibly be used to create an appropriate preview.

Yeah, I could see that being a pain.  Before I’d recreate the site for previews, I’d set up a duplicate testing (dev) site.  This would allow you to get things looking like you want before pushing the changes to the production (live) server.

this would make it even more time consuming to update any design/functionality changes (thanks for the suggestions tho- we’ll find the right solution i’m sure 😊)

After looking a little further, there is an extension hook called publish_form_preview_additions that could possibly be used to create an appropriate preview.

http://ee.koruproductions.com/live_link/

the instructions are a bit confusing…. what exactly does this mean? (any examples?)

// template group and names with the weblog_id appended to
        // create separate options for each weblog
        //
        // Follow this pattern for each weblog, replacing the # with
        // the id of the weblog:
        // 
        // $settings['tmpl_group_#'] = 'template_group';
        // $settings['tmpl_name_#'] = 'template_name';

// Just as with the $settings array in ext.live_link.php
// you must have a pair of keys and values so your
// settings will be labeled properly.
//
// Follow this format, replacing # with the id of
// the weblog:
//
// "tmpl_group_#" =>
// "Name of Template Group",
//
// "tmpl_name_#" =>
// "Name of Template",

I missed that extension entirely… Glad to know it’s there.

What it’s asking you to do is replace the # character with the numeric id of the weblog and then give the associated template group and the primary template name that’s to be used for the preview.

So, say you’re wanting to do it with EE’s standard weblog template.

$settings['tmpl_group_1'] = 'site';
$settings['tmpl_name_1'] = 'comments';

This would associate that template group and name with every entry in that weblog for preview purposes.  For each additional weblog, you add two more lines changing the number and the template info.