ExpressionEngine 2.0 Entry Previews with NSM Live Look

Now you can have live previews in your ExpressionEngine 2.0 publish page.

17/09/10 — NSM Live Look is now officially available over on expressionengine-addons.com! Go download it now.

For those who don’t know, NSM Live Look is an extension that adds a new ‘Live Look’ tab to the publish form in the control panel. The tab contains a preview of the last saved version of an entry.

Screenshot

Comments

The following 12 people were compelled to have their say. We encourage you to do the same.

Chad Crowell said on Thursday 4th March, 5:13am: 1

While I understand your desire to market Newism - please consider removing NSM from the tab. Screen real estate should be more important and our clients have no need to know who built the tool. Otherwise, looks fantastic!
Leevi Graham said on Thursday 4th March, 1:00pm: 2

I’m not 100% sure but don’t think we’ll remove it by default because this it’s a free addon.

You can however delete the tab and create a new one with whatever title you like in the layout editor.

We might consider a commercial version for $5 to remove all of the branding (and subsidise development). What are your thoughts on that?
Chad Crowell said on Thursday 4th March, 3:29pm: 3

I like the tool but don’t use it often, so if its something that I want to use for a site I certainly won’t let $5 get in my way.

I don’t think you are going to gain anything by having NSM on a tab that my pasta sauce seller EE client is using. Who are you hoping to market to by doing this?

I suppose we are maybe at the turning point in EE add-on development where nomenclature that includes NSM for Newism or MD for Masuga Design or ER for Eric Reagan is moving from a simple identifier to a marketing tool. No so sure I like that.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that add on devs should be paid for their products if they decide to charge for them. My initial thought is, either charge for it or don’t charge for it, but keep your initials off the user interface that my clients are using.

My personal opinion of course, and as long as you keep making useful add-ons, I’ll support you by paying for them when I need them.
Leevi Graham said on Saturday 13th March, 6:57pm: 4

For me the LG identifier was always way to stand out and build for lack of a better phrase “brand loyalty”. I’m happy that other devs have chosen to take a similar approach because I can instantly recognise addons that I have previously had experience with.

So back to why I added NSM to the Live Look tab. I’m taking a guess that 90% of the EE2 sites currently being built are for testing purposes and are not handed over to clients.

At this stage of EE2’s life cycle It’s important for us to establish a good relationship with all of our addon users (implementers?) and from a business point of view we want to reinforce our reputation of providing excellent EE addons. Adding “NSM” to the CP is just one way of achieving this.

Looking to the future (while reviewing my previous comment) I’m not sure charging a nominal amount for removing the branding would be worth the extra development time, even if it is rather minimal.

I think a good compromise would be to drop the “NSM” identifiter on user facing CP UI and still keep it in the extension settings / code. Obviously by the time the site developer has installed the addon they have already been to the addon developers site so re-inforcing the connection is not so much of a concern.
Chad Crowell said on Tuesday 16th March, 3:54am: 5

I think that is a perfect compromise. I really am just going for the client not needing to see/wonder what that is. You know how clients are….

Thanks guys.
Andy said on Tuesday 18th May, 4:57am: 6

Leevi,

I’ll gladly pay $5 for this,but am also happy leaving NSM on the tab too!

Keep up the great work

Andy
andy said on Thursday 20th May, 9:00pm: 7

I’d pay $5 too, micropayments are the way forward.
Richard Cantwell said on Tuesday 1st June, 8:45pm: 8

Hi - i’ve just downloaded and installed the plugin - in extenions it goves me 3 option to install - field type, module and extenion - i’ve installed all 3 then i come to the Extension settings which gives me a list of tags {} - under all these i get the ‘text’ ..
“Channel Title Preview URL Use page URL?” and “Add another preview URL” - then a button ‘Save extension settings’ - i can’t seen to add a preview URL anywhere? - i’m thinking that the above text is meant to be a button/text input field or something? I’m running v2.0.1pb01 - can anyone help? Thanks for any assistance in advance!
Tom said on Friday 11th June, 3:11pm: 9

Hi there,

The plugin looks great, I seem to be having the same problem Richard C is having - any ideas?
Leevi Graham said on Friday 11th June, 3:18pm: 10

Did you guys install the Morphine theme addon?
Tom said on Tuesday 15th June, 7:54pm: 11

Hmmm nope, must have missed that Morphine was a pre-req.

Looks like Tom.fail
Leevi Graham said on Thursday 24th June, 10:29pm: 12

If the NSM Live Look settings are not working make sure you’ve installed: http://github.com/newism/nsm.morphine.ee_theme_addon

I’m updating the NSM Live Look README soon with better instructions but until then leave any issues on github.

Like EE2 this software should still be considered beta.