Hi,
Something which is not (to my knowledge) covered in the manuals is exactly what you see when you preview an item in the Content Explorer. Specifically what you see in slots, and when you click on hyperlinks.
The following is what I believe to be the situation in 6.5.2. Please correct me if I am wrong:
When you preview an item, using a page template, everything which comes from a field within the content item is shown in its current version. However, anything that is brought in from another content item, via a slot and a snippet template, could be an old version. If that other content item has never been in a Public state at any point in its history, then you will see the current version of it. But if it has been public, then moved back to either a Quick Edit or Draft state, then you will see the “last public revision.” Even if you (the user who is previewing) just went and modified that other content item, and are now previewing an item that links to it, to see how it looks, you will not see your changes. (This is a scenario that we think would be quite likely, especially for home pages, which are almost nothing but slots.)
This also applies to the managed navigation. If a navon (or navtree) has been in a public state at some point in its history, then moving it back to Quick Edit, and changing the landing page assigned to it via the landing page slot, does not change the destination of hyperlinks in the managed navigation of any item in the same site, when previewed. Not until the navon is returned to a public state do the links get updated. The state of the landing page itself is irrelevant. This is particularly count-intuitive, in my opinion, because navons are not real content. They are a mechanism for linking two pieces of content, and as such it seems odd that they behave differently before and after the first time they have been sent to Public.
That’s what has been explained to me in a series of emails with tech support, regarding an issue that wasn’t related to this, but diagnosis of which was confused by the above never having been fully explained in any of the documentation (at least not in the context of previewing.)
My question is: Can we (the system admins) change any of this, if we think it will confuse our users? Perhaps using a context variable to specify that, when previewing, all slots display the latest version? There are two viewpoints: that the preview should show what a page would look like if the content item were sent to public then a publishing run immediately started, or that the preview should show what page would look like if all the content items in the site were sent to public then a publishing run started. Both viewpoints are valid but, at the moment, it seems only the former is catered for in Rhythmyx.
Thanks,
Andrew.