Re: Preview problems

Hey,

Samuel, thanks for bringing up this topic. I would like to encourage 
more such discussions on Silva-dev. While it's unlikely we'll be able to 
give a satisfactory answer when someone points out deep problems or big 
new features, discussing them does help make some progress on those 
topics and can make the situation more clear to everybody involved.

Samuel Schluep wrote:
> I would like to summarize some problems, which apply to previewing and 
> seem to be related:

[preview mode doesn't work right and it should]

This is a complicated problem. I've been thinking about this in the 
light of the design of the reference management system. Since this takes 
control over all links in a Silva site, it should at least become 
somewhat more easy to implement something like this. It's a hard problem 
though that has a large impact to multiple subsystems of Silva, so if 
we'll do this it won't be a quick & easy job.

> 3. Authors also get confused if metadata is changed, but the change is 
> not rendered correctly in the preview. The Silva default 
> get_metadata_element always returns viewable metadata (what if the 
> content has not been published yet?). Again an expert layout programmer 
> can create a custom get_metadata-element script using the view_method 
> parameter. Couldn't this be easier?

This should be easier; metadata can be retrieved from a version and the 
layout templates should work on a version. I think we need to improve 
the metadata retrieval API to make this simpler for layout designers, 
and update the default templates. I'll create an issue: 1075

[snip ghost problems]

I'll leave the answer to these ghost issues up to someone else who knows 
more about how the metadata system interacts with ghosts.

[snip]
> Are there already nice solutions or are there some plans relating to 
> these issues, which I have missed?

Your point 3. should be the easiest to tackle. I can't fully judge the 
complexity of the metadata-ghost issue, but I expect it could be handled 
along with point 3 as we flesh out a better API.

The first two points you mention *should* become more easy once Silva 
takes control over the management of links. That reference management 
itself is however not a simple thing to tackle -- we're currently 
thinking very hard about that topic. I've included the preview mode 
requirements in our thinking, though I can't promise we'll actually 
fulfill them any time soon.

Regards,

Martijn