Preview feature and Categories Menu

Hi Steve

Thanks for posting.

What would you like to happen when you click the "preview" button?  Do you just want to see the one article you are working on?  

What's the URL to the front end page that displays all your records?  Have your tried putting that in as the "preview" link in your section editor?

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hi Ross,

The one record being worked on. We have no need for the "list" view preview (each record is an individual website page).

The "controller" page is called "/pages.php" and that was entered as the value for List Page, Detail Page, and Preview Page. (otherwise Permalinks plugin alert error to ensure admin user put a value in for each)

We use this one getCategories call:

  // load records from 'site_pages'
  list($site_pagesRecords, $selectedSite_pages) = getCategories(array(
    'tableName'            => 'site_pages', 
    'categoryFormat'       => 'showall',  
    'defaultCategory'      => '',   
    'rootCategoryNum'      => '',  
    'ulAttributes'         => '',   
    'selectedCategoryNum'  => '',      
    'ulAttributesCallback' => 'customMenuUlAttr',      
    'liAttributesCallback' => 'customMenuLiAttr',      
    'loadCreatedBy'        => false,   
    'loadUploads'          => true,    
    'ignoreHidden'         => false,   
    'debugSql'             => false,  
  ));

We then create the navigation menu based on this. The website page content is rendered according to "selected category" record.

Base example for page output:

<?php if (!$selectedSite_pages): ?>
      <h1>Page Not Found</h1>
      <p>Oops! The requested page could not be found!</p>
<?php endif ?>

<?php if ($selectedSite_pages): ?>
   <h1><?php echo htmlencode($selectedSite_pages['name']) ?></h1>
   <?php echo $selectedSite_pages['content']; ?>
<?php endif ?>



When clicking the "preview" button while doing "modify" a single record it triggers "if no selected pages".

Thank you,
Steve

Hi Steve

The problem you are running into here is that your front end page is setup as a "list page" and when you are clicking the Preview button, the preview system is expecting a "detail page".  

Basically, this isn't going to work.

What you will want to look into is setting up a new front end page that's setup as a "detail page" and use that with your preview.

Does that make sense?

Let me know how you make out.

Hi Ross,

Okay, that most certainly makes sense. The original thought there was efficiency with a single getCategories database call, but obviously that's not going to work with the preview system. Aside from that item, the front end functionality and page load speed appeared to work well with that setup - however, we'd like to keep in line with best practices for working with CMSB and will update our code base accordingly. Thank you.

So just to recap, in order to have the preview system work as intended we'll have to use the getCategories call to handle creation of the website navigation and a separate getRecords call in the "detail" fashion to handle page rendering.

Cheers,
Steve