Hello, for those who manage separate development sites, how to you manage it? Subdomain? or a subfolder within your main domain? Or as a completely separate domain? I have a large custom built html/php website (8,195 physical files, 96 folders, and many dynamically generated pages) and have been managing it as a completely separate domain. I used to update everything direct on the live site when I had less traffic, but today, I can no longer 'experiment' with features and have to keep it a separate dev site, but I'm struggling to manage it. The main reason is if I update my dev file, I then have to copy that file to my local files for the real website, then search/replace the dev domain name to the real domain name, then copy to the live server. And if I update multiple files, it gets complicated and is easy to forget to copy over one of the updated files- especially when buried in multiple folders. All the files are 1.3 GB, so I can't copy all and do a massive search/replace for all each time, but just those that change. It seems like a messy solution and there has got to be a better way. I do have a main include.php file where I can change the domain name variable from dev to real, but I have globals off for security reasons and that include file is not included in all files, many have the variable stored within its own file, hence the search/replace each time. How do you manage your development site? Any recommendations?
I just hide the files extensions within the name of the site I'm working on, so if I was building xyzderp.com I'd do most of the development at xyzderp.com/r4nd0mth1nlyveiledn4me - throw <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> in there immediately and go, go, go.