[consulting] preview of a home page

[Sami Khan]

Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
> On 1/4/07, Mariano Barcia <mariano.barcia at colaborativa.net> wrote:
>   
>> Isn´t there a way in Drupal to preview the home page, without actually
>> publishing the nodes in the home page?
>>     
>
> I originally replied directly because it seems off-topic for
> consulting, but the answer is simple if you read the Drupal.org forums
> on a regular basis:
>
> "Test site.  Always begin with a test site."
>
> Then you can test out exactly what the site will look like on a
> private area prior to showing it to the world.
>
>   
This method wouldn't work for any type of online site with multiple 
editors or multiple users who login to the server. If you have any sort 
of commits to the database, i.e. logs, user logins, etc. you're going to 
seriously bork things as you're going to be losing the data when you 
"promote" your content to the live server. It would work for a single 
user site with no one who logs in and you don't use Drupal for your 
primary logs.

Regards,
Sami

> Consulting content: For a variety of sites that I've run or consulted
> on one of the first things I do is make sure that I can quickly and
> easily create a backup of the live copy and then load it into a local
> environment and also make it easy to reverse the process and promote
> changes into the live environment.  If this feels overly burdensome
> you can justify it on a couple grounds: 1) it gets easier 2) it's
> similar to the process you'll need to restore a backup in case
> everything goes wrong so you should be good at it 3) it allows you to
> test changes without worrying about users and reduces the temptation
> to "cowboy code" on the live server.
>
> Greg
>
>