LivePreview 1.0

By Arvind Satyanarayan on | Filed under Plugins » LivePreview | Comments (13)

My typical workflow for publishing an entry in Movable Type consists of writing and publishing the entry to a Sandbox weblog, checking that it contains no spelling, grammatical or styling issues and then transferring it to my main blogs. Suffice to say, this is a fairly time consuming method as some error always occurs during the transferring process. Hence, this weekend, I sat down and wrote a plugin that would save me all this trouble.

Presenting LivePreview, this plugin finally implements live previewing in Movable Type. It adds a new button on the entry screen which when clicked causes a new panel to appear at the bottom. This panel will contain a preview of your entry as it would appear were it published on your weblog - styling, javascript, php includes etc. The best part about it is, you can keep going back and changing and live previewing your entry without having to save it whatsoever.

In fact to better demonstrate this plugin, I've created a screencast which can be viewed here (excuse the 3MB size - my video skills are near non-existent!). LivePreview is a free plugin, if however you find this useful, please consider donating $5 if you're a personal user or $20 if you're a commercial user.

13 Comments

Mike D. said:
on Apr 8, 2006 10:46 PM | Reply

Finally the plug-in I've been waiting for for three years! However, LivePreview.cgi is throwing an internal server error so it's not working for me. Any ideas? I'm running on a standard Dreamhost setup. MT 3.2.

I wish I could be of more help but I'm not too good at debugging internal server errors.

Magic said:
on Apr 9, 2006 4:59 AM | Reply

Internal server error also! Why? I can't understand.... Any docs about this plugin? Help please!

katerw said:
on Apr 11, 2006 5:38 AM | Reply

Same here.

Awesome plugin... but so far just 404 internal errors. I'm going to keep digging to see if I can figure it out.

Su said:
on Apr 11, 2006 3:22 PM | Reply

All three of you above:
Make sure you have BigPAPI 1.04 installed. This is the version bundled with LivePreview, and also the latest. Note that anything previous to 1.04 was based on beta versions of MT.

I was intentionally doing the install on my test MT system with every dumb mistake I could think of, and managed to fix the problem(in my case) by upgrading BigPAPI from 1.03 to 1.04. Confirmation from others would help narrow this down.

Mike, I'm on Dreamhost also, if it matters.

Arvind, oddly enough, after 1.04 fixed the issue for me, it stayed fixed even after I downgraded back to 1.03. Before that, though, the error was a little weird. It seems like the preview window was trying to display a popup error message. But it looked like the actual source for the template was being sent as the URL, so of course the system was barfing. Within all the junk, there was an indication that the process died in LivePreview.pm at line 145, if that helps.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Apr 11, 2006 3:45 PM | Reply

Hi Su, thanks for that. Yeah I was being rather silly with the way the error messages are handled. I may need to put out a new release (1.01) soon and I'll deal with this bug at that point.

Also folks that are getting the Internal Server Errors, check the normal things like file permissions, paths to perl and uploaded in ASCII. Also check the server error logs and MT's activity log to see if there's anything fishy. Thanks.

juneegirl said:
on Apr 25, 2006 12:27 PM | Reply

Thanks Arvind, this plugin installed and worked great. I had no problems at all. This is the perfect tool for times when you need to add a style, and want to make sure it's right. Cuts the time spent going back and forth between windows.

Sherwin Techico said:
on Apr 26, 2006 1:24 PM | Reply

This should save some great amount of time! Thanks Arvind.

juneegirl said:
on Apr 29, 2006 6:55 AM | Reply

This plugin seems to be working properly, but in my MT activity log I'm getting this error over and over:

LivePreview died with: Undefined subroutine &MT::Plugin::LivePreview::_edit_template called at lib/MT/Callback.pm line 22.

Any ideas?

Megan said:
on May 19, 2006 5:56 PM | Reply

Hey, anyone know when the next version of MT is coming out? It's been a year, right? They definitely need some help with the entry styling function.

Don said:
on May 27, 2006 5:28 AM | Reply

Hi...not sure where to post this as many links seem to be dead. Anytime I try and download ANY plugins from this site I get "URL Not Found" errors...I've copied the txt received and pasted below:

Not Found
The requested URL /mt-blogroll/ was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I'd really like to try out te MT Blogroll (I'm new to MT and blogging in general). Thanks to anybody that helps! :)

Marius said:
on Jun 30, 2006 4:45 AM | Reply

Hi Arvind,

What could be the cause for this error:

Died at lib/LivePreview.pm line 145

Thanks in advance for your help and continued support to make MT a better product!

Marius

Marius said:
on Jun 30, 2006 5:04 AM | Reply

Hi Arvind,

Please disregard last comment. I toyed with the system paths and now it seems to write to the temp dierctory.

However: The preview screen show empty after "Building LivePreview...". I checked to see what the temp files look like by straight loading the url in a browser, but the page is just empty. Any clue?

I understand you are not obligated to respond, but maybe you have seen this problem in your development before.

Kind regards, Marius

PS. Good luck with getting your forum up and running again ;)

Andrew said:
on Aug 20, 2006 5:01 PM | Reply

I've been getting the same problem as Marius :(

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Anon said:
on Jun 8, 2007 at 2:22 PM | Reply