[wp-hackers] Usability of post previews

[David House]

As most of you will be aware, authors can view previews of their own
drafts by just going to the associated URL. That's fine, as long as
they don't decide to share this URL with their friends: suddenly
they'd be in a very confusing mix whereby their friends are looking at
a 404 page and they're seeing the post proper, for exactly the same
URL.

My question is whether we should consider just putting a notice at the
top of these pages that says something to the effect of 'No-one else
will be able to see this post, because it's a preview of a draft'.
I've developed a patch that provides this infrastructure, just asking
whether it would be a good idea.

On the one hand, it seems like a simple solution to a potentially
confusing problem, as outlined in the first paragraph. On the other
hand, the only time that poeple will see their drafts in this preview
state is likely to be on the write post screen, where (in 1.6) this
preview is loaded in an iframe to show the user what the post would
look like in its real setting. Here it's obvious no-one else will be
able to see this post, and as such the 'This is a preview notice' is a
bit superfluous.

Thoughts?

--
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com, http://xmouse.ithium.net