This tehcnique will certainly work, but I also keep a staging site on my Mac, dispite the differences in SQL version.
I periodically export my database from the production version and import it into my staging site on my mac. I try stuff out there. All new modules get tried out on my local machine before copying them to the production site. Espically theming work is much more repsonsive on a local box.
You've probably allready got your staging site up by now, but in case there were others listening I thought I'd mention it.
-----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of A-NO-NE Music Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 11:44 AM To: Drupal Support Subject: [support] Staging question
Thanks for many helps from this list, I am getting close to deploy a Drupal site. Since I can't stage on my local machine (ISP uses MySQL v4, which I can't find download for OSX, and I already burnt once by uploading v5 file from my local machine), I need to create a staging site on my server. I created a duplicated DB, renamed 'stage'.
The question is the next step. Do I have to duplicate everything to stage.<sitename>.com directory? I really do not wish to do this since, not only audio/video files are big, synching the two might be a nightmare.
I googled around. I see a few posts asking for how to do a staging site, but no hit on any answer to this question.