Currently you can only see a preview of the live site pages by hitting the "Preview" button in the upper right corner of the Joomla window. If the K2 Item is unpublished I don't think there is any way of previewing what the live page would look like. Is there any work-around for this?

I think it would be a great addition to be able to do this. Also, to be able to email a link to the preview to a collegue for review and approval for publishing would be nice.

hello,
I've also been searching for a way to do this...
anyone found a solution?

Hi Pocasolta,

While I've been waiting for a better solution I did come up with a work-around, of sorts.

If your site doesn't need to support login by users on the front-end (i.e. all pages are 'public') then you can set the K2 Item's Access Level to "registered" and view it while logged in the the front-end. None of the "public" users will see the page.

You can access the new hidden page by finding it in the K2 category lists pages. If the page is not on one of these lists then you would need to create a Menu Item pointing to it and make the menu item visible by "registered" users as only.

It's not a very elegant solution but it works. What i really want is a Joomla! extension that provides a quick preview of unpublished K2 Items. Better yet would be a full workflow system that supports reviews by colleagues of pending items.

hello Jeff,

thanks a lot for the answer.... it's a good solution for my site!

I have no registering system for front-end users. everyone in front-end is public.

the only thing I'll have to add is the login module in my site, which I had disabled.

btw... instead of making a new category or menu item and mark it with 'registered users' permission I think I will directly mark the new k2 items as 'registered users' only. this way I will be able to see every item under its real category. when I have the item reviewed I will switch it to 'public'.

thanks again!
=)

Hi,

I really miss being able to "preview" unpublished items too. Hopefully that feature will show up down the road a piece.

You don´t have to do this. Show login module if you don´t want.
Just after your front page url add:
/index.php?option=com_user&view=login

And you can login in frontend. No menu link or login module have to be activated.


pocasolta said:<<br /> the only thing I'll have to add is the login module in my site, which I had disabled.

Btw, i cannot se preview at all. Not with Joomla default preview nor with Better preview plugin. Strange.
SEF is not activated at all. Preview of Joomla articles works without problems.

Set K2 item as "Special" (temporary), login in frontend as Administrator and you can see every change before other visitors (and registered) see it.

I find an other solution, not very clean but it worked great :

 

In com_k2/views/item : Comment the lines 75 and 87, like that, when you save an article and even is unpublished, you can view it with the direct link to the article, no error 404 message anymore ;)

 

Be careful, doing that, any user who have the adresse of the article, even is unpublished, can view it.

 

 

I too am looking for a way to do this, but I need to allow contributors to preview their own articles. I have users set up as 'authors' in joomla, and have given them access to specific categories, but they don't have backend access and can't  publish their own items. 

Is there a way I could get them to preview their unpublished items? I can't find a way. The methods above require backend logins. 

The only solution I could think of was to somehow make sure contributor's items where automatically published as 'registered' access level. that way, the items wouldn't be public, but my contributors could view them. I don't know where to start with that. 

 

Any suggestions? Will this require a hack?

 

Keegan

Just posted my solution in this thread -> getk2.org/community/New-to-K2-Ask-here-first/8838-Seeing-unpublished-items-when-logged-in-front-end