3

When I’m in administration mode, using the 'seven' theme, and I click on Preview, instead of using the main theme, the preview uses seven's stylesheets, which is silly-willy because it’s not what I would expect from a preview.

3
  • Because that's the way it was designed and written by Drupal developers?
    – Mołot
    Oct 17, 2014 at 7:38
  • @gurghet i think you post this question in drupal meta for discussion meta.drupal.stackexchange.com
    – DRUPWAY
    Oct 17, 2014 at 7:46
  • Thankyou mouot! I’d like to mark your question but I can’t figure out a way to do it.
    – gurghet
    Oct 17, 2014 at 8:14

1 Answer 1

5

There are lots of reasons why the main theme isn't applied. I think this comment by merlinofchaos sums up some of the larger hurdles well:

Right now, in Drupal, we store temporary data in a cache by caching the generated form. In order to preview, we have to process that form and reassemble data. This is fine when you click preview, but in a system like this, you're actually visiting a different URL from the form.

Logically, we could put the form build id in the URL and load the form and process it, but there are several weaknesses with that:

  1. It is wasteful (processing a form that was not submitted)
  2. Form build IDs are sha generated strings. There is no way to reproduce it if you don't have it. This means you can't do content locking.
  3. It continues the trend on Drupal of the form owning the data when the form typically should only be a representation of the data.

Read More »

Lot's of contrib modules have attempted to address these issues:

That said, "Allow to preview content in an actual live environment" recently made it into Drupal 8 Core

But don't get too excited. "Allow content creators to preview exactly how content will appear on the site after it's saved" is still very much a work in progress. And recent comments indicate it will be a Drupal 9, not 8 issue.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.