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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

What's your workflow for letting your writer preview the generated styled pages?

Great question. We basically set every article as a draft, and because they can write in WYSIWIG writer now (no markdown) and the netlifycms admin dashboard allows them to see a fully-rendered preview that gets us 80% of the way.

At that point (once we've checked the links and typos, etc) we flip the draft boolean to false and check the article looks as expected on production.

Not perfect – we'd probably have a staging server if we were bigger – but we're still small :)

Thanks, I was just thinking about how this works vs something like WordPress where you can preview how the actual edited page will look before you publish. Netlify CMS lets you view the Markdown, but the non-tech editor would have to understand there's a build delay to the page going live and the final page might need reviewing.

Nothing's perfect though, I just find most static site stories don't address the above so any thoughts are appreciated!

If I remember correctly you can have Netlify CMS commit changes to a branch that is auto-deployed, so you can see the fully rendered preview.

Yep, but how do you explain that to a non-tech person (e.g. URL to visit, how long to wait for the build to finish)?

It's all reflected in the UI, with a "View Live" button that appears when the build is done. It's quite user friendly. I recommend you test it yourself: https://cms-demo.netlify.com/

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