How to use Wagtail Live Preview

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How to use Wagtail Live Preview
0:03:07
Published March 11, 2025
1,105 views

With the Wagtail Live Preview feature, you can view your content in mobile, tablet, and desktop display settings. You can also adjust and resize the panel so that you can keep Live Preview open as you're working on your content. This video shows you how to use the different display settings for Wagtail Live Preview.

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Why should I learn to use Live Preview?

Because knowing how to use Live Preview will save you time and help you catch mistakes in your content as you work on it. Knowing how to adjust Live Preview will also help you create a workspace in Wagtail that works best for you.

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Summary

Wagtail’s Live Preview lets editors see a page as they build it without leaving the editor. The preview panel can show desktop, mobile, and tablet layouts, or open a full-page preview in a new browser tab, and it can be resized to suit the available screen space. Changes to text and block order appear immediately in the preview, making it easier to spot layout and content problems. Required fields must remain populated: removing one produces a warning and prevents the preview from working correctly.

Key takeaways

  • The preview panel shows desktop, mobile, and tablet versions of a page.
  • A full-page preview can be opened in a new browser tab.
  • The panel can be resized so it does not obscure the editor or content blocks.
  • Text edits and changes to block order update immediately in the preview.
  • Required fields must be present for Live Preview to work properly.

Summarised automatically from the transcript.

Transcript

580 words · auto-generated Show

Automatically transcribed, so expect mistakes in names and technical terms.

0:00

Hi folks, Megan here. I'm going to show you a quick demo today of the Wagtail Live Preview feature So right here we have a page from Wagtail. org. This is our sustainability page. I've already filled out the contents so that I don't bore you with typing. And so it looks pretty good But I don't know what it's going to look like on the page until I open the preview panel. To do that, I'm gonna go up here and click this little phone icon here. And that opens up our preview panel. And right away I can see what the page looks like on a desktop display. But if I wanted to change it up and see how it looks like on different sized devices, I can click this icon here to see the mobile. display and then I could click this icon here to get the tablet display and see how everything looks like with that

0:51

And I can go back to desktop or if I wanted to see how it looked like on a full page on my browser in a tab, I can open up a whole full page preview in a brand new tab as well, which is super super handy. Now one other thing people don't know about the live preview panel is that if, you know, if this text is a little too small to read, uh, or you want to you know, adjust it for like your screen size or something like that. You can actually resize the preview panel right here. And so I generally like to pull it all the way out to here just at the edge of the blocks so that I don't cover things up. You may be different. You may want to like take up the whole page or something like that. Anyway, uh And that way, like if you have a large screen like I do, what you can do is you can leave the preview panel open

1:42

and if you're making changes, so like say I wanted to take change this here to Wagtail Goes Green or something like that. You can see that the preview updates with the text as I'm adding it in. This is also useful for like if I'm scrolling through and checking things. Um, oh look, it looks like these two blocks are out of order. So I'm gonna go down here and I'm going to fix that and make sure that we have them in the correct order. So this one needs to be below that one. So I'm gonna fix that. And now you see the blocks have switched up and the order looks better than that before. Now one thing I want to make sure that you know about our preview panel is that you have to be careful around the

2:32

items that have the little red extracts next to them because those are mandatory and our preview works best when the mandatory elements are there. So say I removed this item here, you'll notice like see there's a little warning sign here that tells you that it can't function with without that. So I'm going to go ahead and put that back there That warning goes away and then I can go back to building my content. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that quick demo and I hope you learned something about our preview panel that you can use for your content today

Questions this talk answers

How do I use Wagtail Live Preview to check desktop, tablet, and mobile layouts?

Click the phone icon to open the preview panel, then use the device icons to switch between desktop, mobile, and tablet views. You can also open a full-page preview in a new browser tab.

Discussed at 0:00

Can I resize the Wagtail Live Preview panel?

Yes. Drag the preview panel's edge to make it wider or narrower, which helps you read the preview and keep it from covering the editor.

Discussed at 0:51

Does Wagtail Live Preview update while I edit page content?

Yes. The preview updates as you type, and it reflects changes such as editing text or reordering content blocks while you work.

Discussed at 1:42

What happens if a required field is missing in Wagtail Live Preview?

Preview works best when required elements are present. Removing one produces a warning indicating that the preview cannot function without it; restoring the element removes the warning.

Discussed at 2:32

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