Publishing your first article via StoryChief can be daunting. The last thing you want is to hit publish and realize your article doesn't look the way you expected. Luckily StoryChief can show a preview of what the article will look like before it gets published on the blog.
🔔 Note: This feature is currently possible for the following CMS. We will be adding more website connections in the future:
WordPress
Webflow
HubSpot
SharePoint
Shopify
In this article:
Start publishing draft articles
Step 1. Go to an article you would like to preview.
Step 2. In the audience tab, select the draft checkboxes for the destinations.
🔔 Note: If this feature isn't available for you, check the following:
Make sure the plugins are up to date on the CMS.
Go to your channel settings in StoryChief and click "Save settings" to refresh the connection.
Step 3. Continue to publish the articles. Notice the label informing you of the draft publishing.
Step 4. Click on "View story" to visit the draft version on your website and check out the layout.
Step 5. Back in StoryChief, the destination has a redirect button to help you access the preview.
If you aren't happy with the layout of the articles when publishing them as draft, you can easily finetune it by applying CSS code to your theme.
Be aware that you use the CSS code to change various aspects of your article such as font type, font color, size, text alignment, etc...).
Lock article updates
Step 1. In the channel list, go to the correct channel. 👉 Quick link.
Scroll down, enable the checkbox to lock updates and click 'Save settings'.
Step 2. Open an article, to to the Audience tab and activate the website.
Notice the striped bar and the lock icon. This means that after publishing an article, new updates won't be pushed to this channel anymore.
The reason is that some users still want to make adjustments on the CMS, which shouldn't be overwritten after pushing an update.
WordPress test mode
Our WordPress plugin also has a test mode, which lets you publish draft articles only to the website. Enable this by logging in to your WordPress website. Go to Plugins > StoryChief > Settings and enable the 'testing mode'.
You'll be able to see your content before publishing it on your website. You can click on Preview next to the draft article to see the layout:
Once you've tested out what your article looks like and you're satisfied with the layout, you can disable this 'testing mode'. As such, you can start publishing your articles on your blog.
🔔 Note: Testing mode will disable multi-channel publishing. You won't be able to promote this article through social media or any other channel. Once you're satisfied with the result you should disable the testing mode and republish any published articles with the testing mode enabled.