Creating a staging area

[gkrehbiel]

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to create a staging area for a shopsite store?

I have two thoughts.

1 -- duplicate all my live pages, give them some odd URL, and never publish that URL. (IOW, I can view them, but nobody else is going to find them.) Do my experiments on those pages, and then when I'm happy copy them on top of my live pages.

2 -- set up a second installation of shopsite on a staging server.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks,

Greg

[Jim]

Use a demo store
http://shopsite.com/demo.html

[gkrehbiel]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, that might help in some cases, but in order to test some things I'd have to upload all my custom templates and all my settings and so on.

Is there a way to upload all that stuff in one fell swoop?

Also, don't demo stores disappear after a week? If I wanted to test something else I'd have to set it all up again, right?

Greg

[Jim]

There is no way to upload everything at once but you can upload pages, products through the database upload options. Templates can be copied and pasted into the edit fields.

Initial demo stores are for about a week but you can extend them for longer by sending an email.

[gkrehbiel]

I'll try that. Thanks very much.