Social previews: Show skeleton while rendering messages

[gmjuhasz]

Fixes SOCIAL-475

Proposed changes

• Show skeleton placeholders in social preview message text areas while rendered message requests are pending.
• Keep render-message requests driven by debounced render items so typing only fires one request after debounce.
• Read rendered message cache without triggering resolver requests from preview consumers.
• Add regression coverage for debounce/loading states and skeleton rendering.

Related product discussion/links

• SOCIAL-475

Does this pull request change what data or activity we track or use?

No.

Testing instructions

• Enable the Social message templates feature.
• Open the post editor and open the Social preview/customization UI.
• Type a template token such as {excerpt} into the global or per-connection message template.
• Confirm the preview message area switches to a skeleton immediately, stays skeleton through the debounced render request, then shows the rendered message.
• Confirm only one /wpcom/v2/publicize/render-messages request fires after typing pauses.
• Confirm that with the message templates feature disabled, previews continue using the raw message behavior and do not show skeletons.
• Run pnpm --filter @automattic/social-previews test.
• Run pnpm --filter @automattic/social-previews typecheck.
• Run pnpm --filter @automattic/jetpack-publicize test -- use-connection-preview-data use-render-message-items.
• Run pnpm --filter @automattic/jetpack-publicize typecheck.

CleanShot.2026-05-06.at.17.33.24.mp4

[github-actions]

Are you an Automattician? Please test your changes on all WordPress.com environments to help mitigate accidental explosions.

• To test on WoA, go to the Plugins menu on a WoA dev site. Click on the "Upload" button and follow the upgrade flow to be able to upload, install, and activate the Jetpack Beta plugin. Once the plugin is active, go to Jetpack > Jetpack Beta, select your plugin (Jetpack), and enable the fix/social-475-preview-skeleton branch.
• To test on Simple, run the following command on your sandbox:

bin/jetpack-downloader test jetpack fix/social-475-preview-skeleton

Interested in more tips and information?

• In your local development environment, use the jetpack rsync command to sync your changes to a WoA dev blog.
• Read more about our development workflow here: PCYsg-eg0-p2
• Figure out when your changes will be shipped to customers here: PCYsg-eg5-p2

[github-actions]

Thank you for your PR!

When contributing to Jetpack, we have a few suggestions that can help us test and review your patch:

• ✅ Include a description of your PR changes.
  
• ✅ Add a "[Status]" label (In Progress, Needs Review, ...).
  
• ✅ Add testing instructions.
  
• ✅ Specify whether this PR includes any changes to data or privacy.
  
• ✅ Add changelog entries to affected projects
  

This comment will be updated as you work on your PR and make changes. If you think that some of those checks are not needed for your PR, please explain why you think so. Thanks for cooperation 🤖

---

Follow this PR Review Process:

1. Ensure all required checks appearing at the bottom of this PR are passing.
2. Make sure to test your changes on all platforms that it applies to. You're responsible for the quality of the code you ship.
3. You can use GitHub's Reviewers functionality to request a review.
4. When it's reviewed and merged, you will be pinged in Slack to deploy the changes to WordPress.com simple once the build is done.

If you have questions about anything, reach out in #jetpack-developers for guidance!

[jp-launch-control]

Code Coverage Summary

Coverage changed in 14 files. Only the first 5 are listed here.

File	Coverage	Δ%	Δ Uncovered
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/bluesky-preview/post/body/index.tsx	1/8 (12.50%)	-20.83%	5 💔
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/instagram-preview/post-preview.tsx	0/9 (0.00%)	0.00%	5 💔
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/linkedin-preview/post-preview.tsx	0/9 (0.00%)	0.00%	5 💔
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/nextdoor-preview/post-preview.tsx	0/9 (0.00%)	0.00%	5 💔
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/threads-preview/post-preview.tsx	1/10 (10.00%)	-10.00%	5 💔

1 file is newly checked for coverage.

File	Coverage
projects/js-packages/social-previews/src/shared/message-skeleton/index.tsx	6/6 (100.00%) 💚

Full summary · PHP report · JS report

_{Coverage check overridden by Coverage tests to be added later Use to ignore the Code coverage requirement check when tests will be added in a follow-up PR .}