Throughout our hunt for a replacement CMS for SharePoint it appears that we may have been spoiled and not known it, further more it appears we've created dependencies on that spoiling to the point that we can't think of how to work without it. It turns out sometimes you don't know how good you have it until you're forced to try something else and realize that your old beat up car had some killer features that new cars don't have today.
I mean think about it, you're old 80's junker had an ash tray! Did you smoke? Maybe/maybe not, but regardless I bet you probably used that ashtray for loose change more than you ever did for ashes. Cars today don't have ash trays, so where am I supposed to keep my change? I could use the cup holder for it, but then when i put my soda down it jingles or doesn't sit right. So yes, There are alternatives for how to do things but they aren't as good as the original.
When I first started working with SharePoint I often asked why we needed to go through an Approval cycle for documents, images and pages. Now I've decided files and images, yeah approval for those is somewhat very niche (versioning yes but approval not so much), but pages ohhh has "draft" status ever been helpful. The usefulness of being able to make a change and the user see exactly how that change will appear once it's published to the world, now that's POWER! We can make entire sites look different and the anonymous public will never know until the user gives us the magic "OK" and then we publish and the whole world sees a massive change at once.
I know in previous blog entries I talked about "headless CMS" and the concept that data and visualization should be separate, but the fact is we care about how things look so being able to "preview" how something is going to look before hitting that magic "publish" button is HIGHLY useful. Furthermore being able to do that and not have to have double the resources just to enable you to have a full mirror system for "content development" only to then redo your work in as the separate PROD environment is a huge maintenance and cost saver. Not to mention the ability to make quick turn around changes to non-critical content items.
So preview is an important piece of the process but it goes beyond being able to preview what data will look like in different visualizations stand-alone, you have to be able to view those different forms within the context of the final product. For example, lets say you have a article collection. If I add an article I should be able to see what that article will look like in the roll up, on the article detail page, in a slider (if thats an option), etc... and I should be able to see those "previews" with the rest of the current page content around it. Because viewing one listing item not within the context of the others doesn't give an appreciation for how it will actually look. Nor does seeing the article without the site styling or header and footer applied to it.
Most content editors are visual and they want to know exactly how something is going to look to the visitor, so give them that capability. If people didn't care about how the final output looked then we wouldn't have LCD screens on our digital cameras where we can review photos before we decide to keep/print them or not. Remember how life was back in the real film days? Don't make your website become a "surprise" roll of 35mm where you're not sure if the pictures are gallery worthy or if you have 36 closeups of your thumb.
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