A question about process & site development...

[gribbles]

I'm running a small community web site. Very much a hobby project at the moment, and I can't see it getting huge.

My approach to it so far is that I want to encourage anyone to write articles. Once registred anyone can submit an article.

However, I want to be able to play with menus, new components etc without the users seeing the 'WIP'. I can't use the 'Special' Access group, because Authors are in that and so they see the WIP.

Ideally, I'd have a dev site and just update the live site once I've sussed it all out on the dev site - and although I could do that, I don'r really wnat to at this point in time.

Anyone any ideas how I could do the above - or should I just stop being lazy and set up a local dev site...? 

[humvee]

Ideally, I'd have a dev site and just update the live site once I've sussed it all out on the dev site - and although I could do that, I don'r really wnat to at this point in time.

Anyone any ideas how I could do the above - or should I just stop being lazy and set up a local dev site...? 

Got it in one

This is by far the best and safest way of doing this. If for example you had an Extension that had compatibility issues with the rest of your site - your "public" site would be affected and you would finish up with it offline. Dev site is the the way to go. Whether you choose to run this on the remote host or a localhost installation would then be your next choice. Localhost is quicker and easier to run and test upon initially, but final compatibility testing is best done on remote dev site before then running on Public site.

hth

Andy