Overview

Extends the paradigm of the Preview link module to the concept of previewing more than one item of content, by way of a static site.

Features

Content editors can create unlimited preview sites - each site consists of one or more pieces of draft content they wish to share with non-authenticated users to preview before publishing
Each preview site is associated with a preview-site strategy which comprises
- A generation strategy and
- A deployment strategy
Content editors can then trigger a build and deploy of their preview site, which will use the configured generator to build artefacts for the preview, and then the configured deployment strategy to deploy these artefacts
Generation and deployment strategies are provided by plugins
Ships with a Tome Static based generator by default, but because this is pluggable, you could write a different generation strategy if you had custom requirements
Ships with a sub-module preview_site_s3 that supports deploying the generated files to S3
Takes a best effort to make sure that the preview generated includes drafts of any related content-entities shown on the same page as the previewed entities - e.g. blocks, paragraphs etc - this integrates with Entity usage to identify related content

Requirements

Requires the following contributed module projects:

Tome to power the default generation strategy
Dynamic entity reference to power adding varied content-entities to a preview site
Entity Usage to identify related content that may also have drafts required in the preview site

Configuration

Enable the preview site and optional the preview site S3 sub-module
If you're not enabling the S3 sub-module, you will need a module that provides a Deployment strategy plugin - at this stage that means custom code
Visit /admin/structure/preview-site/strategies and add a new strategy - configuring the generation and deployment plugins as required
Visit /admin/structure/preview-site/builds and add a new preview site build, adding the entities you wish to preview
Save the build and then click Build and Deploy and let it process the generation and deployment
When the process is complete, the link should take you to your built site

A note about S3

By default, S3 won't serve the index.html from inside a folder. Tome static works by creating an index.html for a given path.
E.g /some/pretty/path/on/your/site becomes {preview site uuid}/some/pretty/path/on/your/site/index.html
Configuring S3 to serve index.html will require custom configuration of your S3 bucket.
Note also that by default Preview Site will store the generated files in a sub-directory {preview site uuid}/ - but Tome generates all the links and URLs assuming the site is served from a relative URL. You may be able to resolve this with the Relative Path to Absolute URLs module, or alternatively, you can use a Lambda in front of S3 to route sub-domains to the folders. E.g. {preview site uuid}.yourdomain.com ➡️ yourdomain.com/{preview site uuid}. Configuration of one of these two options is left to the site owner/developer.

Known problems

Please use the issue queue to report issues.

RTBC issues for Preview Site

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