SquareSpace how to view local template?

Question

I am currently developing a customized template of SquareSpace and I am not sure how to view the changes i have done locally? Also are there any resources out there to help me alter the templates, the documentation on the site isnt great?

Answer 1

Being able to develop and then display rendered squarespace (SS) templates in a local development environment (or "offline") seems to be an oft requested feature.

It's not straightforward so far as I can tell. To quote

The short answer is no. There is not currently a way to develop locally.

However, once we get site data exports working it should be a simple matter to setup a lightweight node js script to get local development running.

(source), similar answers

According to the SS docs, the templating engine is JSON Template, the styling is done by LESS and all of the data for a website is stored as JSON. The data for any page of an SS website can be viewed by appending ?format=json-pretty to the URL of the page (or &format=json-pretty if the URL already has a query string appended to it).

Here's an example of how to use the javascript version of JSON Template to render a template (view its source).

So it should be possible to set-up a local devenv. The solution would have to combine the use of the aforementioned components along with a way to combine a set of templates for any given page (e.g. combine sites.region and collections/blog.list for a blog index page). You could probably even hack together an html page along the lines of the aforementioned JSON Template example without the ability to combine templates if you just wanted to develop within a single template.