Interesting workflow enhancement

I gave this a whirl as part of an effort to keep my plugin compatible with a myriad of front-end and page building solutions. Thoughts:

– A preview button takes you to a screen similar to the theme customizer, offering up a live preview of the site with a sidepanel/toolbar on the left.
– The sidepanel is not exactly teeming with functionality, it provides an excerpt and post thumbnail box. What is interesting is the potential to plug in functionality there, like say, some post specific css or color options.
– The post itself is sort of highlighted by dimming other elements on the page. Using twenty fourteen it leaves the left sidebar unchanged, but the content sidebar in 2014 is greyed-outish in preview mode.
– There is a wysiwyg editing instance active on the page, so you can make edits. It uses CKEditor for editing and the button arrangement offers some benefits over the default editor, such as a clearer way of previewing and applying specific styles. (It even sports an anchor tag button which is neat for long posts)

Thinking about this particular approach, I think its strength is for making adjustments to the presentation, assessing layout and spotting problems with the output. I can easily see this kind of implementation being really great for post-specific styling. The content editor feels non-native and a little ugly, to be honest. Hopefully when/if a the newest version to tinymce drops in core, CKEditor can be replaced with a floating editor implementation of the native tinymce editor.

Under the hood, I noticed that it doesn’t use an iframe like the theme customizer does. One side effect with this implementation is that the page is then recognized as an admin page, causing is_admin() to return true. Some plugins check this conditional to prevent front-end scripts from loading in the backend, so they might not load properly in the preview mode.

As is to be expected, this plugin probably won’t work well if you’re using some kind of page builder plugin. Not really the fault of this plugin, just something to be aware of.