Just finished up a new WordPress plugin called Active Preview. The plugin provides a new preview button which creates a new window which is updated in real-time with your edits to the WordPress editor (tinyMCE or the HTML editor). Check out the video demo! I know its a little rough.
Plugin site is here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/active-preview/
Tags: active-preview, plugin, preview, wordpress
The Heap Dump 
April 3, 2010 at 9:39 am |
Hello, is it some joke or what ? I tried the plugin on a fresh installation in FF 3.6.3 and Google Chrome and I’ve got only a simple “preview” page with nothing changed ???
April 3, 2010 at 1:31 pm |
Nope not a joke. Couple of things to verify 1. that you have javascript enabled 2. You ‘activated’ the plugin within the admin console.
April 3, 2010 at 9:44 am |
I’ve got a french version of WP and the Active preview button is translated in Preview button (so the two buttons are the same. What link am I supposed to see if I put the mouse cursor on the Active preview button ?
April 3, 2010 at 1:34 pm |
Ah first bug. Initial release looks for the english words “Preview Changes” in the preview button and transforms it to “Active Preview”. I’ll have to look into fixing that. For now the LOWER preview button in international versions will trigger active preview. So click the lower preview button then it will open a new window which will be updated as you type. Thanks for the heads up!!!
April 3, 2010 at 2:15 pm |
The plugin is activated (if not, I won’t have the second button shown). In FF, javascript is enabled (I did enabled all settings in advanced mode) and I’ve got a lot of plugins working with Java.
Maybe it’s a problem with the hosting ?
April 4, 2010 at 1:19 am |
Ok. If you are seeing the extra link when you click that lower link you should get a NEW window opened and when you make changes in the editor for the post or page you should see the changes in the new window. Once you click update or any other action the link between the child window opened will be broken and the updates will stop. If you haven’t taken a look at the demo video please do. If you are still having issues tell please provide the wordpress version your using, whether you are editing a post or page, and what the behavior your seeing.
April 4, 2010 at 3:00 am
Additionally you can try to switch to html mode and add the following around your post text
then update and you can switch back to ‘visual’. If you have a theme which doesn’t wrap your post text in the default ‘div’ which provided just a second ago the plugin won’t work. I’m working on a better way to do this for the next version.
April 4, 2010 at 8:42 am |
At last, it worked ! But I had to use the WP default theme. The three others I tried did not work (Arthemia, Dailynotes and WP Classic) . Sorry I did not check this first.
New problem: your plugin is in conflict with the javascipt used to upload pictures or preview theme (jquery ?).
As I consider your plugin as a very important feature for WP, I have some questions:
1. How to get a theme compatible with your plugin.
2. I use the php Markdown plugin for my edition. For the moment I got only the shortcode shown and I wonder if your plugin could “translate” the code in the same as the preview mode.
Thank you for your answers and help ! 🙂
April 4, 2010 at 7:13 pm |
Great! Glad to see you got it working and you pointed out some great defects. I actually just dropped a new version (1.2) which should fix every defect except I didn’t bother internationalizing the button text (yet). Its probably simple to do but I’ll tackle that later this week. The good news is now active preview supports ALL THEMES!!! without changing your themes. The only drawback is that I have to wrap all post and page content with a <div id=’wpactivepreview’> … </div> which shouldn’t be too intrusive. Thanks for taking a look at active preview, tell me if you still see any issues but more importantly tell your fellow wordpress users!!!
April 5, 2010 at 8:41 am |
I’ve just tested the 1.2 version.
Another “bug” (?): the Active preview view does not manage paragraph as WP manage them (when you leave a blank line, WP consider there is a new paragraph created).
So, I suppose you won’t make it compatible with Markdown plugin (http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/). Too bad 🙂
I will make a post on my plugins blog this week I think.
Thank you for your work and taking my remarks in consideration.
April 5, 2010 at 1:09 pm |
There could be minor differences in how WP adds markup for line breaks. I’ll be taking a closer look at those in the coming weeks. Just wanted to get something out there to see if folks actually wanted this. Definitely keep the feedback coming as you see issues. Also I haven’t ruled out supporting markdown it will just need some research so will be a week or two before I can determine how feasible it is. it would be GREAT if you did a post about the plugin! I looked at your blog yesterday but sadly I don’t speak french 😦
April 5, 2010 at 1:22 pm |
For my blog, I hesitate to put a translation plugin as there are plenty of english spoken blogs about WP.
For eventual improvement -but I don’t know how it may be possible- it’s a general problem with shortcodes from plugins and Active preview. You’re plugin cannot show for the moment a “real” preview when there are shortcodes to manage.
I think I will put a post on the french WP forum about your plugin as I am very interested in the concept 🙂
April 29, 2010 at 9:14 am |
Great work ! Just two minor problems for me:
with Markdown, a list is created like this:
* list
gives
listbut the plugin does not preview it at all (I see * list)
Another little “bug”,
shows nothing.April 29, 2010 at 9:15 am |
Sorry, my code is not shown. If you want some precision, send me a mail 🙂