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Previewing Your Entries in Textpattern

Friday September 9, 2005 / 12 Comments

One thing that’s always driven me nuts about blogging software and CMS’s in general is that it’s generally impossible to preview your content with your CSS and see how it will actually look on your site. I imagine somebody has done this or posted about this before, but I just came up with a wonderful little solution in Textpattern.

  1. Create a new section called “preview” that uses your desired set of templates.
  2. Set all of the options for that section to “No”
  3. Publish your entry to your “preview” section.
  4. Browse to www.domain.com/preview/ and view the results.
  5. When you’re ready, change the section to the desired section and it’s published.

Now I can go to http://www.garrettdimon.com/preview/ and see how the entry is going to look before I publish it to the world. I can tweak images, make sure there are no typos, and take my sweet time proof-reading it in it’s real context.

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Good to know.. So I am creating a small blog for my oldest client (both in age and in length of time as client). Never used wordpress, never used textpattern.. which way to go? Pros, cons? .. Ben Hirsch
Enjoying the textpattern critique posts. Here’s my 2 cents about Textpattern, build in a function to “hide” or “preview” themes before you publish them.

Or create the ability to work in a development or testing environment without having to publish.

There are ways are to achieve this, but just really cumbersome and annoying to do. Nick Dominguez
In Wordpress, if you save a draft and you go down to the post preview, the title of your post is a link to the permalink. It’s not published on the front page and I believe that you can’t access it just by typing it in. Probably have to be logged in, I guess. Timothy Ng
I actually do exactly what you mentioned with my Textpattern setup, except my section is titled something other than “preview”. chris rhee
I do this also and build it in for clients.

There is also the option to do password protection with one txp tag at the top of the template:

< txp:password_protect login="demo" pass="demo" / >

See it here

u:demo p:demo John Oxton
Well, one problem with TextPattern is that it seems to put the number of comments in the title of the posts in the RSS feed.

Why’s this a problem?? I’m not sure about other feed readers, but bloglines views each update to the comments count as a new entry. So I (and 120 other subscribers) are being told of new content, that isn’t new.

Any way you can fix this?? Chris
Any way you can fix this??

There are ways to do that in Advanced preferences. Just in case you didn’t know :) John Oxton
Like John said, in the more recent Textpattern releases, there is a way to control your advanced preferences from the admin area.

In older versions you had to manually edit the config file. So if you’re using an older version, you can upgrade, otherwise, you’d need to manually edit the options. Garrett
Garrett, I was commenting on your feeds doing this ;) Not needing to do it myself. Chris
Chris – My bad. I guess my Textpattern upgrade changed some of my custom settings back to the default. It’s corrected now. Garrett
It’s not unusual approach to create private category for preview (not only with Textpattern, which is great). However, one shouldn’t forget to disable feeds for that category : ) maratz

Thanks from this tip, it will come handy in future projects!

Vesa Virlander

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