MyBB Community Forums

I have a question about mirror mybboard for development purposes. Basicly I'm running my website in the root of the hosting account. Most of the content is fetched from the forum. The forum is running in wwwroot\forum folder.

For development purposes I'm also running my website at wwwroot\development subfolder. Currently this development location of the website also fetches the content from the operational forum. This is the place where I test html changes etc. in the website code before it goes operational in the root and goes public.

What I'd like to add now is a second forum installation at wwwroot\development\forum which I can use to test new forum releases and to see how it handles those updates both in my forum setup and the development website itself before I propagate the changes in the live environment.

My question is about how to use the MySQL information. Do I let the development forum use the same MySQL user and database so that the content for the development website is the same as the content on the operational website? Will this cause conflicts?

I tried to explain as best as I can, if it's unclear I'll try to clarify some more

Create a new empty database. Call it something like 'forumtest', make the new forum use that, and then you can test anything you want. They'll be completely seperate then.

(2008-09-24, 10:17 AM)Matt_ Wrote: [ -> ]Create a new empty database. Call it something like 'forumtest', make the new forum use that, and then you can test anything you want. They'll be completely seperate then.

Don't really need to create a new database, just use a different table prefix, so that way the mySQL user/password/host all stay the same.

Basically, what you're wanting can't be done. Any changes you make to your "test" board will save the changes to the database. Your "live" board will pick up these changes.

Easiest way is to make a brand new board, and do your updates on that - then import the basic information (stuff like users, forums etc., but not settings)...

Yeah you can do that, but it's easier to make two... if you do something with one prefix that messes up the database, can it not also affect the other one??

That's why I said have 2 databases, you have one which is yoursite.com/forum and one which is yoursite.com/test

Unless you catastrophically do something wrong, along the lines of causing mass hysteria and ending the world, then a myBB install that uses mybb_ can't effect tables with a prefix of test_...

If it does "corrupt" a database - drop the mybb_, or whichever set you're working with, and re-upload a backup.

I'd just be happier if I knew they were completely seperate but that might just be me... if I can have the option of having them as seperate as possible, I will... mainly coz I'd find a way of messing it up

My ISP only permits one database but I have no problems running multiple boards by using different prefices for the database tables and cookies.

You definitely need at the minimum a new table prefix for the testing forum. Each version of MyBB has different settings and database structure that you don't want to apply to your live forum.

You should also change the cookie prefix for each forum, or else you will end up with problems logging in, logging out, etc.

Ok thanks for all the tips. I think I'll go with a fresh forum installation on a separate database just to be safe. There's not an urgent need to exactly have all the live posts in the development forum and I don't feel like burning my hands on this idea. Thanks for the explanations