How do I make the Preview link on a WordPress post or page point somewhere else?

Question

I've done a lot of small projects on the side lately where the client wants a good chunk of the website to stay the same, they just want to be able to edit particular "areas" of the site. Namely, some text in some box somewhere.

I've found that WordPress works for this pretty well. The interface is nice and friendly to use, and it's got lots of work behind it so I don't have to reinvent wheels, fix bugs, etc.

So what I wind up doing is making PHP pages which look like what the client wants, then making the content editable areas contain a particular post or page, which is what is editable in WordPress.

I'm having the particular page's contents displayed on the page using code like this

<?php echo apply_filters('the_content', $page_Contact->post_content); ?>

where $page_Contact is a variable defined elsewhere.

However, the "Preview" or "View Page"/"View Post" function on each page/post goes to the logical WordPress location and this is not the effect I want in this case.

So for example I have pages like this

www.site.com/index.php
www.site.com/about.php
www.site.com/contact.php

And so forth.

WordPress wants to have the "View Page" and "Preview Changes" links go places like

www.site.com/?page_id=2
www.site.com/?page_id=8&preview=true&preview_id=8&preview_nonce=45522671f5

Which is a problem because, in the permalink structure above, both of those go to the index.php page which, except for the page I'm using to structure index.php, it's not where I want the user/editor to go. And none of the cases above allow any sort of preview (which is a concession I'm willing to make given how I'm doing this)

Is there a way, preferably using a plugin to rig WordPress such that the preview for a page in the dashboard goes to a preview of the non-index.php page where the content will be housed? So for example the link for the "Contact" page in WordPress's dashboard goes to contact.php instead of ?page_id=2? This is a deal where I'm trying to get this done in the editing interface and I'm not concerned about the links in the site itself.

Obviously I would need to maintain this per-page and this would be a situation where new pages don't go up unless I put them there.

Answer 1

Have you considered page links to plugin for wordpress? Also changing permalinks?

Answer 2

Take a look at the preview_post_link hook in WordPress -- it should be called when generating that link, and you can use that in conjunction with a custom field (or some logic) in order to construct whatever preview link you like.