I installed and customised a theme last night and it was going well. When I hit PREVIEW it displayed the theme as I expected. But, this morning when I tried to preview it again, suddenly the unchanged CSS wasn’t being previewed at all. I couldn’t understand why it stopped working.
After reading your post above, I tried adding a blank space anywhere in the theme’s CSS, then clicked SAVE. And BOOM, suddenly the preview button works again, just like you said above.
This is a bug. And as you mentioned, it makes it harder to show the theme to others, without explaining the need to do a pointless save first.
I just ran into this as well. It makes it hard to test and build a theme behind the scenes. This should probably be fixed since it is not working as expected by the user.
It would also be nice to be able to make themes available to either Mods or Admins in addition to users. Let’s say we are working on a special Holiday Theme and do not want to show it or make it available right away.
I am having trouble reproducing this, is the problem theme on your site? I tried to repro the issue in dev and was unable to get this cache poisoning problem.
Right now if I go to a specific theme that is not selectable by users (ex /admin/customize/themes/47) and click on “Preview” the preview does not change the theme. If I then go in change anything (ex Color Scheme or theme name etc…) then it will Preview properly.
Just testing it again right now and it is happening to me.