It would be nice if we had some kind of "dry run" page for previewing kickstart templates. It would accept a template and return the rendered version back to the user (without storing it or anything). Users could test their custom kickstarts. Admins could test their snippets. I'm picturing a big textarea containing the template on one half of the page, and a live(ish?) preview of the resulting kickstart beside it.
Bulk reassignment of issues as Bill has moved to another team.
Implementing this as a command-line tool (to be run on the Beaker server) would certainly be much easier than building a web interface for it. The tool could just accept a path to the experimental templates, which would override the real templates (it can just be smooshed onto the start of the ChoiceLoader on template_env).
(In reply to Dan Callaghan from comment #3) ... but note that that only address half this RFE (the admin side of things), it doesn't help ordinary users who want to test out custom kickstart templates.
Some form of REST/xmlrpc call, on the other hand, would work for some of the ordinary users as well -- presumably with some form of authentication. A web UI, while nice for casual use, wouldn't be as convenient for diffs and other work to fix up a troublesome template.
This command-line template debugging tool is a great idea, but it's pretty far from what I was originally imagining for this RFE. So I've cloned it as bug 986177 and proposed it for Beaker 0.15.
Closing this issue. We are not planning to address this problem in the Beaker development lifecycle. Instead of that, we are planning to continue our effort in building Beaker.NEXT. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Best regards, Martin Styk