long time listener first time caller
 

So I took over my forum and all the forum duties from some one that stepped down from the role... so I apologize if i sound like a noob ... I have been doing pretty good so far.

So I have my main forum , and I want to set up a Test forum with all the same information and skins and mod's ... so I can have a solid test bed and a place for my other admins to practice upgrades and fix stuff that come about.

I don't have ssh installed and for me to do that I would have to move servers and sorts and start over and have some huge downtime.

I was reading the article posted here ... which says to use SSH and do some tricks to set it up ...

My question:

If I copy all my forums files into another folder on my root called VBTEST and did a back up of my forum database and then created a new SQL database called VBTEST - could i just import the back up into this database and things should be good to go in theory

I know I would have some path issues with GFX stuff which is easily fixed ...

Thoughts suggestions , tricks I would need to do ... or am I just screwed - :D

You need to make sure to change the includes/config.php file on your test site to point to the new (test) database, otherwise anything you do will affect the live site (eek!).

This may be useful - Step by Step: Create a test forum based on a 'snapshot' of your live one

yea that was the article i was talking about ... i assume i just skip the ssh stuff and do the work around i was mentioning