Why can't I see Magazine article previews?

Thanks. That was a good tip, but I still cannot read the actual text. I can browse through the WordPress admin interface and see that it is there (along with other draft articles), but I can’t open it from that list. The direct link above also still gives me the 404 error page.

However, I don’t want to distract from the main conversation here. Should I open a new topic to ask about this? In the Project Discussion category? Somewhere else? I am not sure.

I made a new thread for you :classic_smiley:

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Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought once you had signed onto the WP site, you should be able to see the preview. There is another preview link that WP gives once an article is actually scheduled. Maybe the following one works better?

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@smarnv - if you are the author you can see the preview (you need to be logged in first)
if you are not the author nor the admin WP will throw the 404. Also the preview URL is not the original URL of the article

There is also a checkbox for “public preview” wich will generate a specific URL with a password that you can use for sharing it with a larger team for a feedback Let me know if you need any help.

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Thanks everyone for your answers! I thought I wrote a reply back then but apparently it didn’t get submitted for some reason, so I wrote my answer now.

I’m aware of what was written as I’ve worked as administrator with smaller WordPress instances before but I think it’s a good reference point for people who might have similar issues in the future, so I think the topic might still be interesting.


Since my current reply has been long overdue, I just logged into the administrative dashboard and went to the section with the posts. There, there are a few different publishing states:

  1. Published: these have a view link and I can view them while I’m logged in with my FAS account. It leads to the public URL of the post which works also for people without Fedora accounts (who are thus never logged in). This works as expected.
  2. Holding Pen: these have a preview link which I can’t open. It leads me to a generic 404 page. The same one which you get if you enter an URL which is not valid and doesn’t point to any existing public article (also without being logged in).
    • Yes, this is a different URL from the (future) public URL but I can’t view it with my account.
  3. Draft and Pending Review: I see them just as a list of non-clickable titles without any links below them (neither “(pre-)view”, nor something else).

As I remember, the article I tried to proofread back then was in the second state and there was a “preview” link which lead me to the 404 error page, therefore I thought it might’ve been connected to lack of some permissions for my account to view it.

It is entirely possible that there is something wrong with the permissions in our WordPress instance. Unfortunately, I don’t see any settings to allow the default “Contributor” role to see the public previews. So I don’t know how to fix this problem. FWIW, here is a screenshot of how the permissions are currently set for posts/articles.

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Thanks for taking your time to investigate this.

Your screenshot looks reasonable to me. Is it possible that just my user doesn’t have the right permissions? Can I somehow check if I have the contributor role?

I looked around in the Fedora Magazine WordPress dashboard but I couldn’t find anything about that. On https://accounts.fedoraproject.org I saw that I have signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement but not much more.

Your role should be set in your user profile. We only use four roles – Contributor (default and lowest perms), Author (Contributor + ability to approve comments), Editor (almost all perms except admin stuff), and Administrator (installing plugins, updating the theme, etc.)

We (usually) bump Contributors up to Author so they can approve (or disapprove) comments posted to their article once they have at least one article published.

To my knowledge (which is very limited where WordPress is concerned) there are no user-specific permissions. The permissions are set per-role and then the users are assigned one of the roles.

OK, then I’m out of ideas what might be the issue so I can’t view the articles which are shown to have public previews.

It’s not a huge deal as unfortunately I am not able to contribute to the magazine on a regular basis right now and I can always write the authors if I see some small typo or similar after the articles I read have been posted. I also haven’t had a deeper look at the magazine section here in the forums and the docs about it yet, but I have them saved and I’ll try to do so sometime in the future.

Therefore, I’m not sure anything should/could be done here. I just found it confusing and that’s why I originally wrote. :man_shrugging:

I’m sure it used to work. I’m not sure when or why it stopped working. You do have to be signed in and you might have to be in the “Author” role.

I just found your profile and updated it to “Author” (it was still set as Contributor). Can you now view this article which I just set to “Public Preview”?

Yes, I can now view it. I can also view the other articles which are set as “public preview” (or at least I tried 2-3 of them). Now I also have the option to edit these articles. I haven’t tried it but now I have links to do so for these.

So apparently you are right that one needs the “author” role. I do think it could be useful if it is possible also for “contributors” to see them without being able to edit stuff (either by mistake or not) but I don’t understand why this isn’t already the case based on the permissions list you posted earlier in this thread.

I agree.

I don’t know either :confused:, but I’m not going to risk granting everyone the ability to edit others’ articles by default (I’m not even sure that I care for the idea of other authors being able to do that.)

Yes, I agree with both parts of what you wrote here.

But actually we understood what the issue was and I have marked as solution your reply with the suggestion that adding the “Author” role can fix it. I think it might be useful further investigating how the permissions could be optimized but for the most part it’s probably not needed. Just good to know that we understood why this was happening.

In my opinion, this thread could be closed now.

I would have to agree 100% with this statement.