Incognito mode in Chrome is not the best workaround. It's far easier to set up multiple Chrome users, then simply open a new window as a different user. I've been using this method for years to access both Admin and Public views simultaneously. This way, you can store settings and passwords for the alternate account. Incognito mode slows you down since you have to enter your credentials every single time you open a new window and doesn't give you access to your installed plug-ins without bypassing security settings.

Just my two cents...

Walt, right. You can open incognito mode and work there as a visitor or log in as a member.

Katya, Astra crew
Membership management features.

Regarding the Incognito workaround, this lets us view our site as a visitor in one tab while staying logged in in Admin view in other tabs, correct?

But if we want to view a page as a member, we still can't log in as ourselves in the incognito tab in Public view, correct? But we could log in as another member?

(For those following this workaround, Firefox has a right-click option to open a link or bookmark in a private window. There is an add-on for Chrome to "Incognito this tab," otherwise I believe Chrome can only open incognito in another window, so you might as well use another browser.)

Walt, thanks for commenting. As always, your comments and suggestions are really valuable.

Agree that our solution does not solve the problem with Admin / Public views. But there are several problems mixed in this thread, so we decided to solve them separately.
I found another thread about Preview mode - https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932/suggestions/8827936. So we will take it into development queue based on votes.

Also, I can suggest one more workaround - Incognito or Privacy browser mode, that we usually use for having Admin and Public views simultaneously. This doesn't solve the problem in full but works in some cases.

Katya, Astra crew
Membership management features

Walt, thank you - good point. Though I'm not sure if we would be able to cover the main problem as you mentioned in what we're currently working on...

Thanks for working on this.

However, I don't think it addresses the main problems, if Admin and Public views will not work simultaneously. It sounds like this will let us easily get into Admin view, but that's already easy.

The main problems are (1) coming up in slow Admin view when we want to start in Public and (2) having to switch back and forth all the time to preview or view changes.

I was given a workaround to (1), to bookmark the URL [our site URL]/Sys/Login/SwitchToHome . This always comes up on the home page in Public view. But #2 is more important.

(I am unclear on the issue of having different Admin pages open in different tabs so, for example, we can change a member's profile without losing our place in an event detail. Does this sometimes work now and sometimes not?)

A more general workaround is to open our website in two different browsers, log into Admin on one, and have the other either logged out or logged into another account. This is clumsy but sometimes the best way.

Is it possible to somehow emulate this, by implementing Admin view as being logged in as another "virtual user", with a different "admin" set of cookies, so that one browser is in effect running two sessions at the same time? The "virtual user" would be sort of an alias of the logged in user, not a real contact, so having the same access and privileges.

I can see a lot of details that might prevent this from working, but it might be easier to solve those issues and get a complete solution, rather than having a partial solution and then continuing to deal with a lot of individual cases like Preview page or Event details.

The ability to have multiple tabs open with different WA admin pages would be immensely helpful.

For example, being able to edit several different contacts from a list without having to go into one contact, make the change, go back to the list (which, if you're doing an Advanced Search, may lose the criteria), go to the next contact, etc. It'd be much easier to open all the contacts in separate tabs.

Another example is editing the website. Although there is a preview pane on the edit pages, often the content of gadgets isn't visible from the backend. I have to navigate to the the frontend, see if the changes were correct, then navigate via the "Switch to Admin" link and hope that it takes me back to website editing; often it takes you elsewhere depending on what frontend page you were viewing, e.g. events, profile, directory, etc. Then I have to navigate back to the website section, then to the page I was working on, then click edit. There's no easy way to get back to editing that webpage. Being able to have both the edit page and the frontend version open in separate tabs would help alleviate this. (Although a true website preview feature would be more useful ultimately!) Right now, having these two tabs opens makes the Admin pages do strange things such as the wrong set of green buttons for that given admin page, not refreshing the main content area, etc.

This same concept is applicable to previewing how an event will look - there's no easy way to switch between the admin and the frontend for this. The ability to have both open at the same time would be very helpful.

Another request that probably belongs here. I would appreciate having a URL that goes to our website but always in Public view, and another one that always starts in Admin view, whatever page that happens to be.

Seems like half the time, the first thing I do when going to our website is to switch views. If this happened quickly, it wouldn't be a problem. But the system is slow enough to make the wait annoying.

If these URLs existed, I could put both of them on my browser's bookmarks toolbar, and always start in the view I want.

This is a small thing, but it would remove an ongoing annoyance.

I have joined similar topics. This particular idea has been in our minds forever, it's just expensive to implement as it would require a lot of code refactoring. But we will at some point.

Ability to keep multiple modules open
I work in the database all day and answer questions about events and intermittently update the website. I would like to have different "modules" open at the same time. Currently I log in as admin from one browser (Chrome) then log in with a different id that has database and event mgmt only from a second browser (I.E.) (same computer).