Testing a live site

[DarkstarTom]

Hi all,

I have nearly finished development of my forum and and starting to plan for launch. Please can someone give me some pointers as to the best way to test future changes to the site without affecting the live site? Do I need to duplicate the theme and set that to only be viewed by me? What about settings and plugins, if I change them in the duplicate do they also change on the live site? Is there any documentation on best practices for editing a live site?

Thanks for any tips!

Tom

[Whiteneo]

Make a localhost with only the lesser changes on your forum and test all there before upload or change anything on your live site i do allways and it's the best way to make some changes on forums.

[ThemeFreaknet]

A local copy is the way to go if you're dealing with Plugins & Themes. If you are using Windows try XAMPP.

If you're just dealing with themes then what you suggested is good enough.

[DarkstarTom]

Thanks guys, good advice. I'll be setting up a local copy today. I use MAMP on a Mac but should be simple enough.

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I've got the localhost version working now, but I'm wondering how to keep the two databases in sync. How do you guys do it?