So you want to have a test site

When I talked about the release of the WordPress 3.1 beta I got a question about something I had said in the comments. Those questions often become blog posts and this one definitely has.

There are a few ways to do this. At first I just set up another version of WordPress in a new folder on my domain. You can set it up exactly as you normally would but I have since actually grabbed a domain and set up my sites that I play with test things on there.

The new domain was so that I could actually test a lot of things and not affect any of my current domains. If all you are going to do is just check out the latest versions and plugin combinations you probably don’t need to do that. You should turn off indexing on it though just in case.

Go to settings – privacy and check the “I would like to block search engines” box.

If you are going to be testing anything that might be considered gray or black hat (like some of the autoblog stuff on the market) you probably don’t want it to affect your blogs that you have worked hard on generating traffic from the search engines. This is when having a separate domain is worthwhile.

Now you have a place where you can add and configure new plugins, test the latest version and see how you can use the new features. I always add new plugins to my test site first because if there is going to be a problem I don’t want it to happen on my good blogs.

Now before I got WP Twin this often meant that I would really screw up the blog and it was not always easy to fix. If you clone it first though I can quickly put it back to what it was. Definitely much better than redoing the whole site which has happened more than once. Regular backups of these sites will save you time whether you use WP Twin or back them up manually.

If you want to be on the absolute edge then add the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. This will allow you to upgrade to the latest test version daily.

If you like to play with test new things having a test blog can really help you and save you the aggravation of messing up your good blogs. Even then eventually you will screw something up on your good blogs so regular backups are important.

Your questions and comments are always appreciated.

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