Preview and live-view
Imagine you are editing the contents of a page, which is already “live” i.e. openly accessible on the web. Any modifications you are making must of course not be directly visible on the live page. Perhaps you are entering contents which are not yet to be published, or you would just like to test something? There must therefore be a preview allowing you to look at, process and reject all documents until you have brought them into a state suitable for live showing.
onion.net therefore has a live view and preview. The following rule applies here for the editorially maintained parts of the system : If you store an object, you see the modifications in the preview, but only when you return the object do the modifications become live.
It is quite simple to prepare larger modifications in this manner. The preview always looks like the live-page will look, as soon as the modifications are returned. If you process texts or add new navigation points, a third person, perhaps the quality assurance representative of your enterprise, can have a look at it and give the modifications the nod before you return the documents and thus make them live.
The rule does not apply for the transformations , i.e. the parts of the system which are responsible for showing the contents and which are not processed by editors, but by web developers . Transformations are complex structures which cannot be updated individually in the case of extensive modifications. Instead there are transformation versions . If programmers make modifications to the transformations, they can test these in the preview. They subsequently create a new transformation version and switch the live-server over. This process only takes a few seconds. The web user does not notice anything of it; the live-page remains on-line over the entire duration.