Live Site and Test Site?

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
A couple of things going on,

If you go with a test site and a deployment site you'll want to set up two different congig files. Check out
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui...ments.html
and the link at the bottom of that.

You'll have to change some function/code around to handle this. For example, you should have a "testing" email account, and anything that sends an email (ie, user registration, someone posts a reply to a forum thread, etc) in your testing/development environment should send to that email account, not the actual users account - your users wont be happy if they start getting emails because you are testing stuff!!!

You'll also need to update your database stuff (which Coccodrillo touched on) so that you have "mirror" databases, one live, one for development. When you make a change to your testing DB (I'm talking about structure, not content), make sure you save the syntax into a "patch" file for that release, and just before you go live with your new branch you can then just copy and paste that "patch" sql syntax into your live db phpmyadmin sql panel and presto, your live DB is now a mirror again of your test DB (in terms for structure, not content).

Just a couple of things to consider.