Development Environment How To — Plugins?

There are plugins that can help, but I don’t believe that they will ever be able to give 100% assurance that the site isn’t indexed at all.

What I’d do is use my hosting contorl panel (I have cPanel, but msot others can do this as well) and set up the directory for the sub-domain with a usename and password for access. That way everything is denied unless it’s correctly authenticated, and it can also show your customers that you’re not allowing just anyone to preview their site.

Thanks Catacaustic

I tried changing permissions, but I just got a 403 unauthorized. I’ll check control panel.

Any recommendation on how to move sites from development to production? I have seen a few plugins that seem to do that.

No, it’s not changing permissions. That won’t help with what you want to do. That’s server-based file permissions – not public access permissions.

When I do moves I copy the files and the database to the new server, and then run this script to do the DB conversions that are needed. That’s all there is to it.

I figured out how to protect directories and that does exactly what I want. Thank you.

The domain and the subdomain are probably on the same server, since I am using my web host. After the initial install, I will have a production system and a development system. Won’t I need a database for each system? Will the script handle that?

While you don’t need a separate databse for each, I owuld highly recommend it. The biggest reason for this is you will need to export the database to another server or account when the site is done and it’s so much eaiser to export a full DB rather then going and trying to select the specific tables for that site from the (possibly) hundreds that can be there if you’re running multiple sites from the same DB. All you need to do is update the wp-config.php file for each site to point ot it’s own DB.

OK great thanks.