Repost: Ability to Preview Collection Items in Draft Status

Since the original question got no answers and was closed, but I have the exact same question, I am just going to repost the original question by @danielbartl Ability to Preview Collection Items in Draft Status

Howdy,

We are not able to really make use of the draft status for collection items currently for the following reason mostly: It’s not possible to preview the layout of the collection item as long as the same is in status Draft.

As a custom workaround for the problem described above we have introduced an additional boolean field called ‘Show on site’. As long as this value is FALSE (NO), the already published item gets filtered when displaying the collection on the site. Having the direct link one can access the page for the collection item in question though and preview and inspect the layout. If everything is fine one can set the switch field to YES and the post will be listed on the site together with all other collection items accordingly. Until the release of the RSS feed feature we could live we our workaround quite fine.

Unfortunately, all non-drafted collection items get published in the RSS feed without any chance of additional filtering configuration.

Is there any way currently around this? Would it be possible to enable previewing of collection items in status Draft (given one has a direct URL) and/or enable filtering of collection items during RSS feed publishing? Many thanks for your help!

Keep up the good work, you’re awesome!

Cheers from Munich,
Daniel

We have the same question for our blog editors: How can they properly preview a post if it is a Draft. The normal Preview functionality doesn’t show HTML Embeds and it seems like currently the only way is to publish the post and filter it on the website somehow, but it will still be in the RSS feed.

Has anyone found a solution to this pretty basic thing?

Thanks.


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

Hey Armin!

Had to do a bit of digging on this one, but the answer ended up being pretty straightforward. The only variable in this that I am not sure of is if you’re discussing previewing these posts from the Designer or the Editor. Regardless, I will go over a solution for both:

  1. The Editor: This one is super simple. When you are within the editor typing up the content of your post, simply click the icon beside the post title that looks like a page with an up-arrow. Doing so will compress the editor view, and take you to the draft post. From there, you can actually edit your page directly within the site. (See below for the icon you click).

  2. The Designer: When you are in the Designer, you simply need to navigate to the Collection Page template for the collection that you want to look at a post in. From there, on the top-bar of the designer, you will see a list of the different pages that exist within the selected Collection. You can then scroll down that list and select the post that you want to preview. (See below for an image of the link you click in the top bar)


    image
    (Note that pages in this dropdown menu that are draft pages will have a prefix of “[Draft]” for your convenience!)

I hope this answers your question. I apologize on behalf of the entire community that it has taken someone so long to get back to you! :slight_smile:

Hi Tyler.

Thanks for getting back to me (and the original poster). While you explained nicely how to preview a post, it doesn’t solve what I was asking. The preview still does not show any HTML embeds.

Say I want to add a simple table to my content:

And now I want to see if it looks right. So I do what you say and click on the arrow. This is what I am presented with:

So the question is still. How can I see an actual preview of my content, without publishing it? I can’t publish it before checking if it looks okay, can I!? I can’t publish it temporarily, because it will appear in the RSS feed everytime I publish it.

Hey Armin,

Ah okay, I must have missed that part of your original post; my bad. As for that issue, I’m really not sure that there is a fix for it without actually publishing the post.

Only thing I can think of is, if you have a Webflow Account Plan, you could go in and make a duplicate of your website without hosting, which would still allow you to have up to 50 CMS items in the staged site. From there, you could “publish” the post first to the staged site. That would allow you to make everything look the way that you want it to without associating it with the real site. Then you could copy the content over to the new site. I know that is a huge pain, but unless anyone else has a better suggestion, that may be the easiest option for now.

Hope someone is able to give you a better suggestion! :slight_smile: