[Lynne]

Jeff, you asked about the purpose of a test board. I use it to test out anything prior to putting it on my live site. But, besides that, the major thing I use it for is upgrades. For instance, in December I finally upgraded my board from 3.0.12 to 3.6.8. I started in November by taking a copy of my live database and putting it up on my test board along with the 3.6.8 php pages and running the upgrade script. Then I installed all the hacks I needed and rewrote the ones I had originally written. After I had it running how I wanted, I took down my live site for an upgrade. Then, I knew I had a couple of other mods to write, so I did them on the test board, exported the product and then imported the product onto my live site. The product/plugin system makes it very easy to move a mod from the test site to your live site. Currently, I have upgraded my test site to 3.7 (only beta 2 at the moment). I am now rewriting some more of my hacks to take advantage of some of the changes made to 3.7. I would never install a hack directly onto my live site without first checking it out on my test site. Of course, I am also one of those that rarely uses a hack as-is. I always seem to want to tweak it a bit for my site.