How does 'Preview' work? - A few simple preview and publish related questions for a first timer
When I click 'Save and Preview' as a content editor I get a new window with a "Preview Mode' footer bar where I can see my unpublished changes.
The preview bar also has a button on it that says 'Preview Website' which opens yet another window that instead of a full 'Preview Mode' bar, has a little 'Preview Mode' tray. It has a little elipsis ('...') which when hovered over says 'Open preview in Backoffice' which seems to toggle the full Preview Mode bar back on.
1) What are these two different preview modes? I'm not sure when I would use one over the other.
2) If I save changes on a child page without publishing, I see that I have a 'Publish with descendants' option on my root node which seems to publish any unpublished changes on that whole section of my content tree. Neat. It launches a dialog though that contains a toggle "Include unpublished content items" which is either redundant or confusing me since my child page gets its changes published regardless of whether the toggle is on/off. Perhaps it is for child pages that have NEVER been published?
3) Is there a place to see a list of all unpublished content in the backoffice?
4) If I want my saved changes to be reviewed by someone else before being published, is that the only way for them to launch into preview mode, by opening any page in edit mode and clicking 'Save and preview'?
Someone more experienced could pipe in, but I don't think there's much of a notable difference in most cases between the two preview modes. The initial one with the full bar at the bottom acts as more of a 'window' to the site that could skew the view since it adds to the length of the page, but provides all the different responsive window size previews too. Versus the 'preview website' mode just seems to act more like viewing the page with a fixed toolbar. I can't think of anything at the moment that would produce notably different results in either view.
Correct. The toggle determines whether it will publish pages that are currently in an 'unpublished' state. This could be because they've never been published before, or because they were explicitly 'unpublished' at some point.
There isn't a place in the Backoffice to see a list of all unpublished content by default from what I know. Could be a package that does it. I have seen a few forum topics that cover the code for generating a list of unpublished a content, and there are tutorials for creating custom dashboards; so that's an option too.
Yes, that is the only way to get into previewing pages by default. A common process though is to have a Workflow, which you can get very easily with the free features of Umbraco Workflow (previously known as Plumber). When an edited page is submitted to Workflow for someone to review changes, there is a 'Preview' button for the content approver there that does not require also saving at the same time.
Thought of one case for using one preview over the other: meta data.
The initial 'preview' mode, since it's an iframe window of the site it loads in Umbraco Preview meta data in the head. So you would have to use the 'preview website' option to see the page's actual head-tag information. Important for say previewing SEO important stuff :3
How does 'Preview' work? - A few simple preview and publish related questions for a first timer
When I click 'Save and Preview' as a content editor I get a new window with a "Preview Mode' footer bar where I can see my unpublished changes.
The preview bar also has a button on it that says 'Preview Website' which opens yet another window that instead of a full 'Preview Mode' bar, has a little 'Preview Mode' tray. It has a little elipsis ('...') which when hovered over says 'Open preview in Backoffice' which seems to toggle the full Preview Mode bar back on.
1) What are these two different preview modes? I'm not sure when I would use one over the other.
2) If I save changes on a child page without publishing, I see that I have a 'Publish with descendants' option on my root node which seems to publish any unpublished changes on that whole section of my content tree. Neat. It launches a dialog though that contains a toggle "Include unpublished content items" which is either redundant or confusing me since my child page gets its changes published regardless of whether the toggle is on/off. Perhaps it is for child pages that have NEVER been published?
3) Is there a place to see a list of all unpublished content in the backoffice?
4) If I want my saved changes to be reviewed by someone else before being published, is that the only way for them to launch into preview mode, by opening any page in edit mode and clicking 'Save and preview'?
Morning npack ^^
Someone more experienced could pipe in, but I don't think there's much of a notable difference in most cases between the two preview modes. The initial one with the full bar at the bottom acts as more of a 'window' to the site that could skew the view since it adds to the length of the page, but provides all the different responsive window size previews too. Versus the 'preview website' mode just seems to act more like viewing the page with a fixed toolbar. I can't think of anything at the moment that would produce notably different results in either view.
Correct. The toggle determines whether it will publish pages that are currently in an 'unpublished' state. This could be because they've never been published before, or because they were explicitly 'unpublished' at some point.
There isn't a place in the Backoffice to see a list of all unpublished content by default from what I know. Could be a package that does it. I have seen a few forum topics that cover the code for generating a list of unpublished a content, and there are tutorials for creating custom dashboards; so that's an option too.
Yes, that is the only way to get into previewing pages by default. A common process though is to have a Workflow, which you can get very easily with the free features of Umbraco Workflow (previously known as Plumber). When an edited page is submitted to Workflow for someone to review changes, there is a 'Preview' button for the content approver there that does not require also saving at the same time.
Thanks Danine for the responses from someone with some experience. It helps a lot to know I'm not missing or misunderstanding something.
Thought of one case for using one preview over the other: meta data.
The initial 'preview' mode, since it's an iframe window of the site it loads in Umbraco Preview meta data in the head. So you would have to use the 'preview website' option to see the page's actual head-tag information. Important for say previewing SEO important stuff :3
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