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)


 * The only way to get the old preview back is to switch to Monobook, something I recommend. The issues with the preview have been prevented to wikia staff before and nothing has been done about it yet.--
 * You can still see the old editor when a wiki is in read–only mode&mdash;a fairly typical event, occurs during Wikia foobars&mdash;but I have no idea how to re–implement it. 20:30, December 21, 2011 (UTC)


 * I recommend using Special:Contact/bug and report each issue to Wikia directly. If you want to help the community you can put the replies Wikia sends back in this forum post. Complaining here on the forums about problems with the RTE especially is really one of the least effective ways to get Wikia to hear you.
 * All that said, Wikia seems to always to reserve the right to cherry-pick complaints to address and many long standing complaints get ignored. In short, don't get your hopes up. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 21 Dec 2011 2:35 PM Pacific
 * You might also want to throw in some other issues while you're at it:
 * The preview doesn't support Javascript that works on the real page.
 * The preview doesn't show red links for links added by templates.
 * The preview doesn't have a Minor edit checkbox, in case you want to change it before Publish.
 * If you turn off the RTE, the CategorySelect feature doesn't appear at all (which wasn't true of the old source editor). -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 21 Dec 2011 2:41 PM Pacific


 * Also, the page width is different, text appears on different lines to what is actually published. Here is the timeline of that being reported and not fixed-- Category:Acer4666 21:46, December 21, 2011 (UTC)