Development Forum
 

Hi guys,

I was curious to know if people here use a development forum and how they go about using them. Can you copy over the current forum exactly as is and go from there?

Also do you need to buy a second licence for it?

Thanks.

No, your license agreement grants you the right to use 1 live board and 1 test board.

All you need to do is create an exact duplicate of your board: copy your files and database - then just change your database details in your testboard's include/config.php file to reflect the new database.

And yes, I use one. :)

Thanks for the info guys.

As a bit of a newbie to all this. How would I go about copying the database across? And would I only need to change the database name or other elements as well?

It depends on how you manage your databases. Do you have Shell access?

All you'd need to change is the database's name. If you've got phpMyAdmin or cPanel you can generate a backup of your database through those.

Alternatively, if you've got Shell or Telnet access, you can use those: http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...atabase_backup

Yes we do have shell access.

After looking into it a bit I think the best way to do it is to backup the database within the admincp, create a new db using phpmyadmin and import the .sql file as per the instructions passed on by kirk y, then change the data of the copied config.php file to match the new db name. Is this on the ball?

Would it be better to have the test forum as a sub domain or a completely new domain?

You can just create it using a sub directory of your domain. You don't need an entirely different domain. So you would have something like yoursite.com/forum/ and yoursite.com/testvb/

Have copied forum files into a protected testvb sub directory, created a new database and imported all the data from the old database, changed the the config.php file to read the new database, but when I type in the domain and password it says the page cannot be found.

Any ideas?

Are you sure you copied them correctly?

Ok, ive done a bit of testing to see what the problem might be. Tried removing the secure access to the directory but that had no impact. Because we use a .htaccess file to direct traffic I thought that might be intefering so I set up the test folder on a different server but it still was experiencing the same problem (http 404 not found).

I appreciate the help I've gotten i just need to get over the line with this one. :)