Joomla 1.5 - preview link to article before publishing

Question

In Joomla 1.5, I created the article. Before publishing it, I want to send a preview URL to my colleagues (they are not registered to Joomla).

I'm looking for something like adding task=preview to the URL and it would show the article. It would be enough if the article would be normally published but would not be displayed on the main page in the latest news. I tried to set "Front Page" to "No" but without success.

What is the most easiest and cleanest way to solve the problem? Thanks.

Answer 1

I just selected Section: "Uncategorised" and the article went out from the latest news. Hope it's not accessible any other way in the current setup (there is no search function hopefully). It's not a cleanest solution, but it seems to work.

Answer 2

Joomla! 1.5 doesn't have a feature like this and from the way it's built I'm not sure it's possible without modifying the core com_content files. You could try a search of the Joomla! Extension Directory to see if someone has implemented what you're after.

In the meantime if the article is turning up on the websites front page even when you've set it not to - then the front page must be using a Section/Category Blog page style rather than a Joomla Frontpage page. In this case you could find out which category is set to show on the menu item being used for the front page and then temporarily change your article to another that doesn't appear there.

Once you've got it in another Category you should be able to get a link to the article by doing a search from the front end (assuming you don't want to create a menu link).

Answer 3

try creating a new category called Preview and since that wouldn't have been assigned to any pages yet, it should not appear. If you have trouble finding the article then, you could temporarily publish it either on the home page or somewhere in the menu. Then when you have found and copied the url, you can remove the article from the home page or menu or wherever you temporarily have it appear.

If you should ever want several 'preview' articles appearing on one page, create a new menu item, assign it to the Preview category you made, and in System Parameters, click on Show Title: 'No' so it doesn't appear in the menu. I don't know about what shows up in Google for example so if it's sensitive data I can't say it won't show in search engines, it probably will.

It probably appears on the Front Page because as you say it's part of the 'latest news' module. You could also try removing it from the module feed, but a new category is what I'd do.

Paul