I'm working on a SPS install where the client is using a 3rd party CMS which will publish items (news & html) to a Sharepoint server as part of its operation (it will hook into the SPS API for this). As part of this, they would like to be able to preview how the items will look in SPS before they are published to the SPS site. SPS doesn't have a feature like this (well, as far as I know...) so does anyone have any ideas how this could be done?

A quick think suggests we could

i, have a duplicate SPS server to publish 'preview' items to. If the items are approved, they are then published to the 'real' site.

ii, have some mocked up templates taken from the SPS server, the content could be shown in there to get an idea of how it will look in the real site.

Has anyone done anything similar? Any experiences to report?