Some time ago, when we were planning v3 of the
CMS, we laid a lot of framework for the publishing engine. We realised the engine was useful for publishing other types of pages for use "within" the CMS application itself, rather than just publishing to the preview or live server. It was a nagging thought in the back of our minds, a list of ideas we wanted to try with the engine to produce internal preview pages for viewing and editing (more on editing later...)
With a bit of free time today, we've added a page preview tab right in the centre of the edit page function. So now you can view your changes in real-time before they are published. The engine, in matter of an hour, was producing internal previews of pages. We were very happy all that initial hard work for the publishing engine paid off again :-)
As you can see from the image above, clicking on the home page of our website in the CMS brings up a preview of the currently approved page in the window right in the middle-left of the page. A handy little page preview before you commit yourself to publishing your changes. You can also preview full screen if you like.
This preview page is separate from the full "preview / live" publish process, so if you have
content authoring turned on, it will show the latest additions made by your users in the CMS page preview but will only be fully published to the preview or live server once a publisher user signs off the changes.
Better page navigation
Some of our clients have a large list of pages and sub pages in their navigation. A feature which missed the last few deadlines is the ability to expand and collapse large page structures, which in turn makes it much easier to navigate the page structure in the CMS. It keeps the navigation small and simple until you expand the structure by clicking on the plus icon or by selecting the parent page which will automatically expand the child page beneath it.
These features are currently in beta but we expect them to pass Q&A mid-way June 2009 and will be rolled out to our existing v3 customers the week after.
- Dev Team