Update: creating previews of live projects
With our platform, it is possible to create and share a preview of your project before you publish it live to your audience. However, before this update, new adjustments that were made afterwards had to be published live immediately without a preview. Luckily with this update, this is no longer necessary. Now you can create a 'Preview URL' for both live and inactive projects and share it with colleagues and clients for review. In this blog update, we will tell you more about the updated preview and publishing workflow.
Create a temporary preview link
To view a working interactive version of a project, you must first publish this project. You can publish a project live immediately (the link is then publicly accessible) or first view it on a "Preview URL". With a preview URL, you give clients or colleagues access to a temporary (private) version of this project. You can prepare a preview from the page overview in the dashboard or directly from the editor.
Once the preview is published, you can copy the link to your clipboard to send for review. It is also possible to send the 'Preview link' directly from the dashboard in a formatted e-mail to colleagues or clients. Do you want to quickly check the project on your mobile device and don't want to type in the entire URL? Then you are able to scan the QR code with the camera from your smartphone.
Publishing a live project
Got approval for your sent preview? In order to publish the preview to a live publication, you must first set the project to active. You can do this via the switch in 'Publish' or via the project settings. Once everything turns green after publishing, you can share the link publicly.
Previewing a live project
Thanks to this update, it is now also possible to have new changes to a live publication checked with a separate preview link. This way you can share a preview link for review without the changes being published to the live version. After adjusting the pages, you will see that the indication circles in the page overview change from green to orange. The orange colour indicates that there are open changes to your project.
Via 'Preview' you can update the pending changes and publish them to a preview. Or you can choose 'Publish' to publish the pending changes immediately. When the publishing of the preview is complete, you will see the notification status 'In preview' behind the adjusted pages. This indicates that the pages can be viewed via a preview URL but can't be viewed live yet by the regular page visitors of the publication. Once you have a go, you can publish the project again by clicking 'Live URL'.
Extra indicators
With the coloured indicators and the 'Publication status' next to each page, we now visually show whether changes are open to publish. This was not always clear before the update. With an additional red indicator at the top right of the publish button, you can now quickly see whether changes are still open.
Better insight into the loading progress
Publishing or generating a preview or a project will take some time. Usually, the generating times are a few seconds per page. With the update, it is no longer necessary to stare at an endless spinning charging icon. As soon as the project has started publishing, we show by means of a progress bar how long it can still take.
To learn more about the updated preview and publish workflow, you can visit our Help Center:
