settup of development environment
 

I am working for a .org that just purchased vbulletin. I will have a total of 4 developers working on the site together. I'm wondering if anyone has some hints at how to manage multiple developers working on the same site or a prod/test site.

Is is possible to run both a production and a test instance on the same host (test under a different path)?

Are developers allowed to install a local copy?

Any hints on using source control with vbulletin?

Any help appreciated.

Yes, just generate a backup of your production database, and restore it to a new database. In the config for your test environment, point it to your test database, instead of your production one.
You tell me? If they have access to the server, they will have access to your source. If they have access to make changes to this, they can easily grab your database as well. They simply need to copy the public_html directory (or whatever is configured in apache) and the database to create a local instance of the project. This is probably the best way to work too.

If you don't trust your contributors, it probably isn't a great idea to use them.

I'm not sure if this was more of a licensing-related question though.
Anything would work. Subversion would probably be among the simplest.

Hope this helps.

Yes I was referring to licensing with that question.

You can run both on the same host but the test instance must be protected by .htaccess from the public.

As far as I understand the license, no they can not install a local copy (granted this is all but impossible to enforce).

No sorry as I'm quite the novice myself :D