The importance of a test area

Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on April 21, 2007

If you design your own blog theme or even if you just do some minor modifcations, its very important to have a test area for you to mess around with new ideas and changes to your design.

It’s also very important for doing updates to your blog software.

Messing around with the design or the code of a live site can cause you a lot of problems if something doesn’t turn out right. Adding a link or doing something basic is fine however messing around with the css code or adding some untested php code can cause your blog to be unusable for your readers.

The Test Area

For any blog i strongly recommend having a test area set up somewhere on the web. It can be on a different folder of your main site but preferably it should be on a different domain.

I have a test area for BloggingTips which i use all the time. To setup a test area for your blog you need to :

Install a fresh copy of your blog software on a different folder or doman on the web
Make sure the blog software is the same version as the one on your blog
Copy some posts over, leave some dummy comments and even try and link to your own posts to create some trackbacks. What your trying to do here is recreate your blog as best you can so you can test every aspect of your site.

So whenever i want to change some aspect of the site design or code I :

Make sure all php files are the same in the test area as they are on the main site
Copy over the theme files from the live site to the test area
I can then mess around with the design to my hearts content
I then make sure everything is ok and the way i want it in the test area
Now that i know the css and php code is fine in the test area, i can then copy all the files from the test area back to the live blog

By making sure the test area is identical to the live blog then i can update and change the design of the site without the risk of the live blog ever getting messed up.

Remember to make sure that the test is identical in every aspect - that means the files, the css theme files and even the plugins.

Once everything is setup, using the test area becomes second nature.

If you have any questions please let me know.

Good luck,

Kevin

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Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on April 21, 2007 | Filed Under Design & Coding

4 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Steve Wordpressguy | April 21st, 2007 at 4:19 am #

I couldn’t agree more. You never know when a Digg storm may break out on your site, and you don’t want to be in the middle of a 20 minute template mishap when it does.
A lot of hosts allow subdomains to be created on your domain with an entirely seperate WP (or whatever) install that you can play with. Just set your robots file to block access, or lock access to your IP to stop your test block being indexed.
Kevin | April 21st, 2007 at 4:44 am #

you bring up a very good point steve. The robots file is something i never thought about writing about when i was writing this post today (dont know why haha). You certainly dont want the spiders crawling around your test area.