Sometimes you want to make a few tweaks to your blog without these changes actually going live for the public to see. This may involve everything from testing out a new theme to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. Whatever your motivation, there are times when you want these adjustments to remain hidden to the rest of the Internet until you’re good and ready to show everyone.
The Maintenance Mode plug-in for WordPress allows you to do this. When activated, the plug-in will transform every page on your blog into a splash page, telling visitors that the site is down for maintenance and will be back in an about an hour. During this time, you can make whatever changes you need to make, previewing them in your WordPress admin area. When it’s time to go live again, you simply turn Maintenance Mode off and you’re back to normal, renewed with some fresh additions and adjustments.
On a side note, if you make use of the Automated Upgrade, it comes pre-packaged with a version of Maintenance Mode.
Matt
August 29, 2007 11:53 am
A better, but more manual, way of doing this is to mirror your Blog onto a “test blog”. By copying the files, making a new database, and then moving your existing database over, you’ll have a perfect copy of your blog. You can then test out things on the test blog, and when you’re ready for them to go on your actual blog, you can just “push” them over to your live blog (unless you made changes to the comments table, you probably shouldn’t move it over, you might lose some comments). Of course, you’d have to re-copy over the database if you make any posts or change any settings on the live blog, so as to not lose them if you copy the test blog database over the live blog…
Derek
August 31, 2007 1:30 pm
Awhile ago I wrote a post on my site about using XAMPP for a local development environment. This is a great way to mirror your blog without requiring online access or setting up another live site.
It lets you test themes and plugins without any worry about impacting your live site. Once everything is good to go, you can simply copy files over to your live site. It has worked well for me.
Matt
August 31, 2007 5:05 pm
It’s better to have the dev copy on the same server/host as your live site. Then you won’t have any problems with different versions of software (eg. Apache, PHP, MySQL).
XAMPP installs Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2.x and MySQL 5.x, most hosts run Apache 1.3, PHP 4.x/PHP 5.x and MySQL 4.x. It’s better to avoid any problems you might have testing on different versions than you’re using live.