Private link to view closed entry

Question

I need to be able to generate private links for entries that aren't visible on the front-end of the website. I guess I could just setup an alternative template that isn't linked within the website structure. The links don't need to be very secure but this still feels a bit half-baked. Has anyone setup something like this before?

Answer 1

If it doesn't need to be particularly secure, create a separate sub-domain, and set up a global variable to show different statuses depending on which sub-domain they're on. If you're using FocusLab Master Config this is simple, otherwise try something like this in your main public index.php file under where it says "CUSTOM CONFIG VALUES":

switch($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]) { 
  case "previews.domain.com" : 
    $assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://previews.domain.com/'; 
    $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_entry_statuses'] = 'open|Draft';
    break;  
  case "www.domain.com" :
  case "domain.com" :
    $assign_to_config['site_url'] = 'http://www.domain.com/';
    $assign_to_config['global_vars']['gv_entry_statuses'] = 'open';
    break;
}

Then any time you use a channel entries tag, add the parameter status="{gv_entry_statuses}"

You can use this technique to allow editors a quick and simple workflow for creating new content before launching to the live site. Rather than using the 'closed' status you should really create a new custom status for this, such as "draft" or "pending", because it's useful to keep "closed" for stuff that really should never appear anywhere ever (but for some reason needs to be kept in the system).

You can also use this technique for quick and dirty forking into separate templates, e.g. you could specify a different folder for tmpl_file_basepath using $assign_to_config['tmpl_file_basepath'] so that the sub-domain displays a completely different version of the site. (Much better to use a proper version-controlled environment with Git deployments, but that can take a while to set up and is not necessary for really small sites.)