Do you clone your website or forum for development purposes?

[Cedric]

I've been working on web development for quite some time now, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on a common practice in the industry - cloning websites or forums for development purposes.

Some developers prefer to create a replica of their live website or forum on a separate server or subdomain to avoid any disruption to their live site during the development process. This way, they can experiment with new designs, functionality, or updates without affecting the user experience on their main website or forum.

On the other hand, some developers argue that cloning the site is unnecessary, as it can lead to issues such as duplicate content and problems with SEO. They prefer to work on the live site directly and use techniques such as version control and staging environments to ensure that any changes are properly tested before being implemented on the live site.

So, what are your thoughts on this? Do you clone your website or forum for development purposes, or do you prefer to work directly on the live site? What are some of the pros and cons of each method, and how do you ensure that your website or forum remains secure and functional during the development process? Let's start a discussion!

 

[Arantor]

Well, a staging environment should be a representative clone of production functionally; it should have access to all the things production has access to, and if that's to third party systems, ideally it should be using test mode implementations - e.g. if you're hooking up to Stripe, staging should be using the test mode keys and everything to forcibly separate from production.

Should you model staging closely enough to include *content*? Probably not. At least not for content development, unless it's tied to functionality, where you might build the content on staging and release the content and functionality together.

Me personally, I often have three environments - the one where I'm actually doing development, the staging environment where people not me can test it, and production. I have even worked with clients who insisted on having an additional QA server where dev is done on staging, and things are released to QA and tested by a different group of people who tested it in staging, and then released to production after that extra testing.

But my personal stuff is usually just two environments - dev/staging and production.

 

[Cory]

I have a test board that I use to primarily back up the coding of my site, but I may use it to test new features and additions for the main forum. Most JavaScript I run on my test board before I add it to my primary board. Simple edits I just make directly to the board itself. Sometimes I may add new JavaScript to the primary board itself but I would probably make it where it's only operatable for me with a simple if statement, but I generally do most major JavaScript work on my test board first.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Sometimes I will have a test forum set up to make sure plugins work properly before installing them on my live site. I remember running into an issue setting up a few features for a old fluxbb forum I had, I tried installing the color username plugin along with the private messaging system and ran into issues, so it's a good thing I tested it out on a non-live version of my forum.

 

[Tracy]

To be brutally honest... nope.
If I am going to make some major changes to the site, I simply run the backup script I have created and back up the entire site, then go about my editing. I do the same thing anytime I plan on doing add-on upgrades. Like I said, the backup script doesn't take that long to run and gives me a virgin working copy that I can restore from within a matter of minutes.
I can, from that backup, be back online in no more than 3-4 minutes. The hassle of keeping another site set up and kept in equivalency is a lot more of a pain in the arse. I could see if/when the site becomes really large, but for where it is at now, it's overkill..
CAN I do that.. you bet. I have 2 dedicated servers here at the house that run ProxMox (for VPS instances and my NAS on each) and creating another VPS instance is not that big of a hassle.... but honestly, why? I DO have "spare" styles that are copies of what my main ones are that I do my "tweaking" on then copy those over to the primary site.

 

[Heatman]

To be brutally honest... nope.
If I am going to make some major changes to the site, I simply run the backup script I have created and back up the entire site, then go about my editing. I do the same thing anytime I plan on doing add-on upgrades. Like I said, the backup script doesn't take that long to run and gives me a virgin working copy that I can restore from within a matter of minutes.
I can, from that backup, be back online in no more than 3-4 minutes. The hassle of keeping another site set up and kept in equivalency is a lot more of a pain in the arse. I could see if/when the site becomes really large, but for where it is at now, it's overkill..
CAN I do that.. you bet. I have 2 dedicated servers here at the house that run ProxMox (for VPS instances and my NAS on each) and creating another VPS instance is not that big of a hassle.... but honestly, why? I DO have "spare" styles that are copies of what my main ones are that I do my "tweaking" on then copy those over to the primary site.

Seriously, it's just too much work that's not necessarily important in my own opinion. Why go through the whole process of doing the same thing twice when there's a better way to doing it from backup? I would never put myself through such stress for any reason whatsoever. The inconvenience isn't worth it.