Previewing unpublished dynamic pages

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1

We’re creating an online news magazine. We have collections for Issues, Stories, Contributors, and Artwork. Issues are consecutively numbered, and Stories, Contributors, and Artwork entries all carry an issue number that determines the issue with which they’re associated.

To ‘publish’ an issue, we simply make it the ‘active’ issue (a boolean field in the Issue collection). When we do that, the home page automatically redefines itself so that its repeater shows only stories for that issue, and the older stories automatically move to an ‘archive’ page. Meanwhile, our contributor page’s repeater adjusts to show only contributors to the current issue.

However, we have this problem. We don’t want stories or contributors or artwork to show up in searches until we publish the issue to which they belong. But the only way to prevent that is to use each collection’s built-in ‘Published’ / ‘Draft’ functionality. However, if we mark an item as a Draft, we can’t see it as a page in Preview. Pages for draft items don’t even appear as a choice for previewing.

Because some of our dynamic pages are complex, we really want the ability to preview them.

Our best idea is to set the item temporarily to Published, look at it in Preview, and then revert it to Draft. That’s clumsy and inconvenient, and I’m not sure what happens if that page gets indexed while it’s being previewed (will it now show up in searches, even when we ‘un-publish’?).

Does anyone have suggestions for a better way to handle this?

2

Hi @jim75924 ,

You have an option to create a test site, it will publish in a different url:

544×731 40.5 KB

Let me know if this helps.

3

@idoh . Thanks for pointing me to that! I’ll take a look and see if it works for us.

4

Hi, @idoh . If I’m correctly understanding the documentation, a test site won’t solve our problem, since all versions of the site rely on the same data collection.

Our problem is that we can’t preview a collection item unless it’s marked as ‘Published’. Since all site versions use the same collection data, we can’t mark an item as Published in one site version but leave it as ‘Draft’ in the other.

5

I wonder if my original post over-explained (and therefore complicated) the issue. Here’s a simplified explanation:

We have collection items that we don’t want to expose to searches. It seems that the only way we can prevent that is to mark them as ‘Drafts’. However, when we mark them as Drafts, their dynamic item pages aren’t available for Preview.

Because the pages are complex, it’s important to us to be able to preview them before publication.

The only option we can think of is to temporarily mark an item as ‘Published’, preview it, and then set it back to draft.

That’s not ideal, but we’re wondering if anyone has a better approach.

I was hopeful with Ido’s suggestion, but it appears that test sites don’t allow different versions of data collections items.

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