Maintaining Production/development environment

[aaronpais]

I will be publishing my Pligg site into production soon. Does anyone have any advice/guidelines on how to maintain a production/development environment?

I use Godaddy for hosting. I just created a subdomain called 'testing' and sub-folder called testing. So the idea would be that the development server would be hosted at testing.mydomain.com

So I am assuming that I would just copy the production code/folders into the new testing folder and re-assign all the paths and link to a newly created database, right?

Since I am new at Pligg, I want to make sure I have a development setup so I can concurrently work on adding the new modules/code upgrades to that environment, so as not to disrupt the production environment.

Any tips on how to 'hide' the development environment? I am sure there are some smart people out there (competitor) who might scan for a development sub-domain, to see what we are working on in the background...

[chuckroast]

I am sure there are some smart people out there who might scan for a development sub-domain...

A smart person wouldn't be entertained by finding an empty pligg installation.

[acidride]

I will be publishing my Pligg site into production soon. Does anyone have any advice/guidelines on how to maintain a production/development environment?

I use Godaddy for hosting. I just created a subdomain called 'testing' and sub-folder called testing. So the idea would be that the development server would be hosted at testing.mydomain.com

So I am assuming that I would just copy the production code/folders into the new testing folder and re-assign all the paths and link to a newly created database, right?

Since I am new at Pligg, I want to make sure I have a development setup so I can concurrently work on adding the new modules/code upgrades to that environment, so as not to disrupt the production environment.

Any tips on how to 'hide' the development environment? I am sure there are some smart people out there (competitor) who might scan for a development sub-domain, to see what we are working on in the background...

I have a different sub-folder for each major revision point in my subversion cvs. So the folders will look something like /dev/rev-3941 and /dev/rev-4102.

The changes are not committed to the base folder where the live site runs until it is fully tested. Just set authentication requirements in your htaccess folder and require login.

You can have a test database that all the development revisions access. You can create multiple databases on most shared hosting.