1. Create a new database with a different name

2. Make a backup of the production db and restore the backup to the new database

3. in your testing version set the connection string to point to the new database

Hope that helps,

Joe

Probably best to leave that decision to the developer since I don't know if the database he is using is on an older or newer version of mojoPortal than your production database.

You don't want to use an older version than your production version if your plan it to later update the actual production site. As long as the development environment is using the same or a newer version of mojoPortal then the copy of production can be upgraded by visiting the mojoPortal setup page and that will be a more realistic test if you later paln to update the production site the same way.

However I don't know anything about the custom feature the developer is working on or whether it has installation scripts that will install it from the setup page.

If you are not the developer you should consult with him about this.

Hope that helps,

Joe

When you deploy a new version of mojoPortal over an existing site of course it will and should overwrite the mojoPortal files but it will not affect any content files such as images uploaded by users. All of the site content except user uploaded files is stored in the database.

You will want to make sure you backup your Web.config file and restore any customizations such as the machinekey from the old web.config into the new one.

But you really need to know what version you are deploying, you definitely do not want to deploy an older version of mojoPortal on top of an existing installation of a newer version of mojoPortal.

So assuming the dev version is a newer build of mojoPortal than your production site, you can make a copy of all the files from the production site into your test environment and then deploy the dev build on top of it.

Hope that helps,

Joe

You can do whatever you want but if you have a separate testing environment I don't see the problem, you can update a copy of your skin in the testing environment and then you will already have the needed changes when you decide to finally update the production site.