This past weekend was the most unproductive I’ve been since the holidays. It’s not like I had nothing to do either, I just had a hard time staying focused. I did manage to experiment with a few different plugins though, one of which temporarily broke the Wordpress. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to recommend a test installation.

Basically, I keep a parallel instance of each site running privately so I can test things before rolling them out publicly. I just install wordpress to a domain subdirectory, and in setup I opt not to make it visible to search engines. Since I use DreamHost, and they have one-click installations, it literally takes me 5 minutes max to set it up. I copy the theme over to the test environment, and take the installation active.

Over the weekend, I was installing and testing the Adsense Deluxe plugin and placing adsense ads for tshirtreviewblog.com. By doing this in the test environment, I was able to try different ad sizes and locations without breaking or distorting the theme publicly. In fact, another plugin I was testing for managing 301 redirects broke the site pretty badly whenever a link was active. Again, this was thankfully done in the test environment and was invisible publicly.

This doesn’t just go for plugins of course, it’s great for trying new graphics or CSS tweaks. Once I know everything will work alright, I simply switch to the live installation and repeat. You could use one Wordpress test environment if you run substantially similar sites, but I have fairly unique plugin setups for both sites. If I clone T-Shirt Review Blog, which I may do in the future, I could continue to use the same test environment for multiple sites.

Update: Here’s a good personal example of how this setup can save your ass at some point.