I would say this belongs to https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/8826097-ability-to-preview-changes-to-theme-header-css-b

Make it possible to "migrate" the design from your clone site to your actual site, for easier web redesign.

It would be nice to be able to change the site template and preview it, modify it, save it and publish it when it's ready, instead of changing the template an modifying it while it's live. Thank you!

Would like to build a new tee layout of existing website and when finished replace it with new layout and publish

Add option to Preview new theme/changes and migrate the changes to my website. Cloned page is not acceptable

The preview mode doesn't appear on the roadmap. Do you have any idea as to when it will happen? I need to do a design update on my site using one of the responsive themes and this would make things so much easier.

For now, you can create a special group and assign yourself into it. Then select Limited access to the page and check the group. You can see the page now, everyone else can't.

Are there instructions how to do a "draft" page? I want to play around with ideas and see how they look before publishing it for all to see.

You mean like a separate 'Draft' version of a page, correct?

Would love to hear from other users on this.

For now a workaround is to duplicate a page and make it admin-only, then once satisfied with edits, delete old one and make new one visible. Or copy-paste HTML into the old page.

It's in the general Roadmap http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Product+roadmap list, but not in first lines.

Just curious where this is at? Can't wait for it!

Good news about testing area - we have finished analysis and design of it!

The key driver for analysis and design of the issue was current process of theme switching. Main problem with current theme switching workflow is that new theme is published directly on live website. For many sites, especially customized ones, automatic transformation to new theme might not go smoothly – and live site will be broken. This is a major issue, stopping people from trying new themes, including the newest responsive themes.

So we decided to introduce a preview mode – a special edit mode for site pages, where changes appear only to the administrator in an isolated environment, not affecting the live site. This is helpful not only for theme switching, but for any site page edits as well – be it editing a single page or even making a heavy customized site using theme overrides.

While you are making changes to the preview site, the live site continues to work. Your visitors and members can register for events, apply for membership, make forum/blog posts – all public workflows remain as is. Administrators can continue work on non-website activities – making events, working with finances, etc.

Once your have finished making updates to the site, you can publish to your live site all the changes made in preview mode, or discard them all.

See the current design mockups in the presentation below.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a-OujDpd6rccRLvtReFEBI7u9Ym522p07jUYzP39Z7c/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000
The issue is now in the development queue, and you can always check current status in our roadmap http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Product+roadmap . Feel free to add your comments and suggestions to the forum thread.

+1 here too! My organization is about to embark on a site redesign adventure and we're hoping to make this transition as smooth as possible.

+1 For me as well. This would be a huge upgrade.

+1 for me on this as well - I'm in the process of doing this on a clone site and its quite a daunting task!

This is my problem too. WA is very accommodating to set up a clone, or sandbox site, but we will need to reproduce all of the changes made back on the old site. Hope this can be expedited!

Good comment from one of out clients:

"We have done a fairly major overhaul on the cloned site, as we became more comfortable with the new version and all of the features it offers for building site pages. All of the work we have put into the clone site will have to be re-done on the old site so I was hoping there would be a way to copy the theme, templates, layouts etc. in one move to replace what is on the live site. Perhaps it would be easier to import the member/contact data and the events we have entered from the old site to the new, and making the cloned site the live one."

So, I want to focus this thread not only on a safe sandbox to play with changes, but also to have an ability to transfer the changes back to "mothership". Otherwise, it's a lot of work to reproduce all the work on main site.

Add my vote, we're heading towards a redesign amd meed to minimise the impact as much as possible

Ian
worthing and adur chamber of commerce

I'm keen for this as well - the current theme preview is half-way there, but you usually want to mess about with it a bit more before deciding if that's really the way you want to go (I had to get a duplicate site going to use as "dev" for this very reason)

Yes, this would be a nice feature. I came to this thread while trying to find out if the capability already existed :).

--Ates