Get public URL before publishing

You got my vote!

Mine too! Can't believe this wasn't an idea already tbh.

The problem with that work around is that the publish date is older when you actually move it to the public section. Not pretty imo.

Other (ugly) work around: The preview url gets a redirect to your published article. So you can share the very very long preview url beforehand.

Hi @mbonnell! Thank you for sharing this suggestion! I am wondering where would the draft link be referenced before publishing? Is your use case around creating a set of draft articles which would link to one another? We could consider a solution around generating the topic URL before publishing, though I’m not entirely sure it is feasible as the URL contains the topic ID which is generated at the time of publishing the content to avoid conflicts with other topic’s ID. 

The workaround @Paul_ mentioned that might solve the issue you’re encountering, especially if you use it in a hyperlink so the readers do not see the long preview link. Once the draft is publish, you will not need to update it because it will automatically redirect to the published topic’s URL. 

Other marketing and product efforts, for example, email campaigns, marketing websites, in-product links to additional information and content. As a broad example, our general flow for releasing a product change is:

a) beta test as employees
b) ship product change to production
c) ship marketing updated
d) ship community posts/information

b and c will often contain links to the community posts, but we have to re-deploy b and c after the community posts are live due to not having a trusted URL that can be used. We don’t want someone to go from a marketing email or marketing website to an invalid URL, but are forced to take that risk due to a lack of a definitive URL being presented. 

Could the topic ID be generated at draft time to avoid the conflict?

I see, the issue is that users will arrive from external sources on a page that will show the 404 error. Even if we would be able to generate the exact URL of a topic before it’s published, users will still not be able to see the content until it is actually published, because the “published” state is what makes a content piece visible to community visitors. I’m afraid your problem would not be addressed, if I understand it correctly.

Please let me know if I’m missing something in defining the problem you’re encountering. 

Thanks @Cristina, the URL is still valuable because then we don’t need to do a re-deploy of marketing or production systems with the correct URL. To be super explicit:

1) Without a valid draft URL:

• The community page doesn’t load.
• Marketing resources don’t have a valid URL
• Product resources don’t have a valid URL
• After releasing community posts, marketing and product have to re-deploy as we couldn’t give a URL in advance which takes time dependent on how long code reviews, builds and deploys take.

2) With a valid draft URL:

• The community page doesn’t load.
• Marketing resources have a valid URL (that would 404)
• Product resources have a valid URL (that would 404)
• After releasing community posts, everything works.
  
   

@mbonnell clearer now, thanks! Just one more small follow-up 🙈 Could you share what do you mean by “valid draft URL”? Why isn’t be the preview link a “valid draft URL? 

Here’s an example preview link:

https://community.IntentionallyReplaced.com/preview/article/224?t=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b3BpY0lkIjoiMjI0IiwiY29udGVudFR5cGUiOiJhcnRpY2xlIn0.622F8aT45WN-liQyBtRYCoMr47WxW-CiQXSfqNJ1z98

When this page goes live, based on other examples, I think the page will be:
 

https://community.IntentionallyReplaced.com/article/community-area-location-number/title-of-post-plusuniqueIdNumber

Aside from removing /preview/article/Number and the very long string thereafter, the final URL doesn’t look anything like the draft URL. 

https://community.IntentionallyReplaced.com/preview/article/224?t=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b3BpY0lkIjoiMjI0IiwiY29udGVudFR5cGUiOiJhcnRpY2xlIn0.622F8aT45WN-liQyBtRYCoMr47WxW-CiQXSfqNJ1z98

https://community.IntentionallyReplaced.com/article/community-area-location-number/title-of-post-plusuniqueIdNumber

I agree. Reserving a short/def. url before publishing would make it a lot easier if other teams need that url for their content. Be it marketing for a newletter or another online team that whants to link to the article. It makes ‘going live’ at the same time easier. The preview url works, but it is long, it says “preview” in it and it is not very SEO friendly to use redirects. I don't think it's designed to use it that way(?).