Previewing a Content Item

Owned by Matthew Wagner
Last updated: Jul 01, 2024

The following applies to XperienCentral versions R29 and higher.


You can easily preview how a content item appears on the website frontend. While in principle the XperienCentral Editor presents a WYSIWYG view of your content and you are pretty much seeing it as it really is while editing it, the preview function shows you the whole picture of the content item without any sign of the Workspace or other parts of the XperienCentral backend. The preview functionality of XperienCentral works for both published and planned versions of content items. Furthermore, you can make the preview of an unpublished content item temporarily available to a non-XperienCentral user, that is, someone who does not have permission to log in to the backend of your XperienCentral deployment.


 Application managers: read more...

Previewing an unpublished content item makes use of a temporary security token. You can define how long this token is valid. See the setting website_settings.previewtoken_expire_minutes on the General tab of the Setup Tool.


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Previewing a Published Content Item

The preview functionality allows you to see exactly how a published content item appears on the XperienCentral frontend. To preview a published content item, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the content item.
  2. While viewing the content item, click the Preview link in the Properties widget:






    The content item will open in a new browser tab. For example:









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Previewing a Planned Content Item

The preview functionality allows you to see exactly how a planned content item will appear on the XperienCentral frontend. To preview a planned content item, follow the steps below.

  1. Navigate to the content item.
  2. While viewing the content item, click the Generate link in the Properties widget.





    A URL similar to the following is copied to the Clipboard:

    http://gxsoftware.com/products/contact.htm?previewtoken=9c9a5af0

    and the "Generate" button is replaced by the message "Copied to Clipboard". Distribute this link to everyone you want to grant the right to the preview. This preview URL is temporary and expires after the amount of time defined by your application manager — the default expiration time is 24 hours.

    Each time you navigate to a content item, the Generate button is again available. If you generate multiple preview URLs, each is unique and all will remain valid for their timeout periods.


    When someone pastes the generated URL in a browser, they will see a preview of the unpublished content item. For example:











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