Last Updated: July 25, 2024, as of MereChurch 1.6.6.
The 'Preview' system on your MereChurch is a great way to check out changes that you make without pubishing them to the world. Your preview pages update each time Sanity auto-saves. Draft changes update in real time to be visible anywhere on the site. "Real time" means within 10 seconds of the change being made in studio.
Previewing on the Homepage:
All homepage blocks respect preview.
(As of 1.6, these blocks did not previously load draft content, but now do: Latest Sermon (Single), Latest of Type, Featured Events, Child Page Links, Location Worship Block, Staff Embed, Latest Sermons, Featured Resources, Featured Series (new) and the Index Nav block)
You will see suspense (gray box outlines in the shape of the block) while the latest data is fetched. After this initial load, the updates will apply in real time like everything else.
Previewing entirely new documents:
In the past, previewing entirely new resources/pages/events caused issues and wasn't well accounted for. This has been fixed; new documents will preview with what they can.
If there's no draft matching the document you've requested to preview, you will see a "draft 404" page. Adding a slug and making sure your slug in the browser and slug in the studio line up will resolve this.
Areas of the site without preview:
There are a few areas of the site still without preview. These are:
- Index pages (e.g. /resources, /resources/authors/andrew-royce, etc.)
- An exception is a series index page, like /series/coffee-mug-verses. The new series index page has added more to these pages so we took the time to implement preview here as well.
- Note: the resource grid still does not load preview data, but the series metadata does (description, hero image, etc.)
- Event grids (e.g. /events)
- More From This Series (new feature on individual resource pages)
- Fallback Images for single pages
- Events: e.g. /events/picnic-in-the-park would not show a draft fallback image, but the Featured Events block would
- Single pages: e.g. /about-us will not show a draft fallback image, but Child Pages would
These areas do not have preview for one reason or another: some are that we don't see a huge use case for it (e.g. previewing the resource card) others are that it was going to be too much time for this release. We wanted to get the 90% preview solution (vast improvement over the previous) in place so it could be used.
If you'd really like one of the above items to load preview data, please let us know! We're not done with preview, and intend to keep improving it in the future. Check out this feature request for better card previews!
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If you still have questions, please feel free to get in touch! We're here to help you with your MereChurch.