To rephrase the question: I need to host and test a wordpress blog, but I want it to be online and tested with some url like "beta.sitename.com" or "test.sitename.com". I have the main "sitename.com" already installed with WordPress. How can I achieve the said feat? Any directions? Do I need to create a sub-domain and install WordPress on it to perform this task?
Just use the maintenance mode plug in. The blog will be accessible to you as the admin, but others will see a maintenance screen. It doesn't matter if you put it on another domain or not..it's the same as being on the main domain...that's just creating extra work when you are ready to launch, you have to move it over. Use the plug in and build it how ever you want and when you are ready just drop the maintenance screen. Simple.
As you said you are already running your website on wordpress, but you want to perform some experiments. To do this, you can install one more copy of wordpress in another subdomain ( but do not try in subdirectory, it will make your current installation more complex and create rewrite apache rewrite problems) be careful to set your new wordpress to be invisible to search engines via your settings panel, and also remove the pingomatic service. test anything you want reinstall and reinstall it any number of times to learn as much as you can : ) regards
I think you can do a WordPress install that works on locally on your PC for testing purposes. I'm not sure how to do this though.
yes, you need to make your PC work like a web server then. Installing Apache will make it useless for other purposes. So you can install an apache emulator called WampServer. It will provide you required PHP and MySQL platform. Hope it helps