To emphasis the title...

currently I ahve your wwm6 script running at http://www.mydomain.com for testing, which once I work out the skin/template and all the functional test, I'll go "live". Once I go live, I still want to continue to do my own internal upgrades and mods, however I dont want to do it on a live site.

I was thinking about setting up something like: http://betatest.mydomain.com with it's own home directory, public_html directory, and even cgi-bin directory. It will first ahve the same copy as www.mydomain.com [scripts and templates], I want it to share the same DB (so it will have the same users, etc, even check the same pop account). This way I can continue to mod the script and upgrade the templates without users seeing wierd changes to the live site. And once it's all testing, I can move the templates and modded messenger.cgi script over.

I intent to mod using relative paths rather than absolute path so I can easily move the script and templates over.

So far, it doesnt appear to be any problems doing this. Do you foresee any problems with this set up?

There is a lot of things I'd like to try to implement, but it will take years before I can do them all, which is stupid to wait until then to go "live". I'm settling to quickly push a "version 1" by the end of this month, and then set up a subdomian to test and write "version 2", and then version 3 and so on... seems logical.

I'm just worried of potentional db corroption... but at worst, i guess it might be safer to give it a seperate db.

I'm assuming all configs are saved in setup.cgi, therefore I can just move the script over after testing, and it "should" work on the production site?

I'm going to try this anyway, but any input is appreciated, esp if it can avoid a potential disaster!

Thanks!

It probably will not cause a problem, but to be sure, I would backup the database daily and save say, the last weeks worth of backups. You can do this manually through the admin panel, or you could use an automated backup script from somewhere.

I would just be careful when creating mod's that will delete or modify data on a massive scale.