Forum:The popup preview doesn't look the way the page will actually look

I don’t use the visual editor because I’m a programmer who’d rather write the markup myself than have a WYSIWYG editor generate messy markup for me. There’s a preview button and a publish button, which is good because it’s nice to preview what I’ve done before publishing. My problem is that the preview button now pops up a preview that isn’t accurate. Here’s some specific problems I’ve seen:


 * 1) Categories aren’t included in the preview at all. I use templates that add categories but I don’t always remember which categories.  If it doesn’t add the one I wanted, I won’t know until I publish.
 * 2) Templates used aren’t listed. The links to templates that were on the full-page preview were the way I got to a template to edit it.
 * 3) Redirect pages aren’t understood. Somebody adds a new page that’s actually a duplicate of an existing page, so I replace it with #REDIRECT Existing Page, and the preview shows a numbered list instead of the redirect arrow.  I can at least see whether I got the name of Existing Page correct, but if I misspelled REDIRECT the preview wouldn’t make it obvious.
 * 4) Styling isn’t applied the same. To make that more specific, I was adding the list of watercooler forum topics to a home page, and the preview didn’t show the icon or bold title for new topics, even though those things did show once I published.
 * 5) The popup preview covers the edit area, so can’t look at the preview while fixing parts of the page that don’t look how I intended them.

Does anyone know a way to get the old full-page preview back? I didn’t see an option for it in my preferences but maybe I just missed it somehow. If there’s no option I will bring this up with Wikia staff.

misterhaan 19:51, December 21, 2011 (UTC)