[consulting] preview of a home page

[Mariano Barcia]

Sami, Greg, thanks for the tips. It is nice to share thoughts and issues
among fellow consultants. Actual R.E.R.O. 8-D

This project I am in would be like a traditional CMS website. I am bidding
to upgrade their current website, which is a Web 1.0 home-grown CMS system.
They have 5-10 editors working on the current system. This customer is not a
start-up or a social community website. Their current website gets 50
hits/sec average.

I think they need to cover part of the gap and desperately want to get their
feet wet with the web 2.0 waters. However, they still need to keep those
good old CMS features, like previewing how the main pages will look like
when actually published.

They use that feature for playing with different configurations, testing the
visual impact of the stories displayed next to each other, or changing the
layout. I think it is an important feature for them to have this tool at
hand.

Having said that, I can comment further:

I don't feel attracted to the idea of a "test site", because this is not a
transactional system, like a home-banking where you have people's money on
the production site. Coordinating the life cycle of
development-staging-production is very complex and very much error-prone.
It's much better if the CMS handles the offline/online content in a single
environment. My idea has been using (views + workflow), just like Sami
suggested. Drupal has this notion of published/unpublished for each node, so
it *could* and should be not so complicated.

I have been thinking a lot about something along the lines of Bér. It is
usually the job of a consultant to choose the right tool and not try to
adequate the job to the tool. Having implemented projects in 3 other CMS
platforms for a variety of customers, and taking a look at the 2-pager reqs
draft of the customer, I think Drupal is among the 2-3 CMSes of choice. So
far, Drupal has most of what you could ask to a one-way publishing system.
Now it even has aggressive caching
(http://drupal.org/project/fastpath_fscache) and a way of editing contents
in place (http://drupal.org/project/dblclick) and that is not "plumbing"
anymore is it?

Thanks for sharing,
--mariano


-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Sami Khan
Sent: Viernes, 05 de Enero de 2007 06:26 a.m.
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] preview of a home page

Hi Mariano,

It depends on your front page. If you have the node module providing the 
front page, then nodes which are not published and promoted to the front 
page are visible to the site administrator only. However, you could most 
likely build a view using the Views module which would allow you to 
preview the content for, for instance, the author of the node, and then 
use workflow to allow users to promote it to publish it. This would mean 
that the node initially would be set to unpublished, when it was 
submitted... which would allow the preview... then someone would have to 
publish it, or call the publish via a cron hook if no one changes it... 
It's not a simple thing to do, btw, but it can be done.

Regards,
Sami

Mariano Barcia wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Isn´t there a way in Drupal to preview the home page, without actually
> publishing the nodes in the home page?
>
> I have been googling for this possibility, and also searching within
> drupal.org, but no luck yet. In large sites with many editors, there must
be
> a way to preview how the home page will look like and I can't find a
single
> mention to this issue. Other CMSs like OpenCMS have the concept of
> Online/Offline environments, or "sandbox" but that´s more developers
> terminology I guess.
>
> Or does the site admin actually preview the home page (sees the
unpublished
> nodes)?
>
> Thanks very much in advance,
> --mariano
>
> ------------------------------------------
> COLABORATIVA.NET
> Mariano Barcia
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