By leonpyoder on

I am undecided about how to develop my website. I have heard that it is good to develop locally to be able to test things out, but on the other I have also read that it is better to develop live on a subdomain so that conditions with the host server are the same and you don't have to change things before putting the site live. So my question is this. Can I begin working on the site live on a subdomain, then at some point if I change my mind ftp the whole site down to a local XAMPP server? And is it possible to work on the site locally on XAMPP then periodically FTP it to the live site to test it out? Do you have to have XAMPP to work locally? I'm not sure what it means to work locally. But my main question is can I start on a subdomain live then change my mind and move the site to a XAMPP server? Sorry but this is all very new to me.

Thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

peterx’s picture

peterx commented

Developing the site at the start generally does not matter. Things become more complicated when you have to make a major change to an existing site. Then you want your local test site and a public quality assurance site where your customer can test before placing the changes on the existing site. The QA site has to be identical to the existing site.

petermoulding.com/web_architect

petermoulding.com/web_architect

leonpyoder’s picture

leonpyoder commented

When you say customer, do you mean the user of the website, or the client who you are building the site for? Instead of using a local test site for the QA site, could you just use a dummy site on a subdomain?

peterx’s picture

peterx commented

You can use subdomains and multisite. See http://drupal.org/node/361795 and similar threads for discussions on making changes with more than one Web site in the same server.

petermoulding.com/web_architect

petermoulding.com/web_architect

ocnetgeek’s picture

ocnetgeek commented

It is relatively easy to copy from a Web Server to an XAMPP server at some point to work on development. It is not as simple as just an FTP though. You will need to FTP the file structure but will also need to export the database from the production site and import it at your development site. Using something like PHPMYADMIN makes that pretty simple.