craigwharris

Thanks Brandon for checking back. I think you have another good idea: try both methods for a while and see what fits. Previously my main concern was that constant uploading ultimately slows you down too much ( if you’re developing locally), although others seem to indicate that the slow down isn’t that significant – especially when factoring in the other tradeoffs(e.g. migration, behavior etc.).

So I think I’ll try the combo approach. I bought Backup Buddy so that should help in any case.

I forgot to ask Tamara-IT, ..what do you use to upload to the live site when that occurs? Do you use tools like (Backup Buddy), or just copy the files and DB manually?
Thanks

Thanks Tamara-IT! Sounds good. I’m not going to use Multi-site (yet) either. I’ll only have 2-3 at first, and I have enough issues to learn as it is.

I’m tempted to develop in a test area on live site, because people seem to indicate that for small theme dev like mine, the performance hit will be negligible.

It sounds like your main motivation to be local is to make sure production is working. Do you have any comments on performance? That is, if you did develop “theme/css development/optimization and plugin testing” on the live site, would it cost you much in terms of time/effort?

Thanks Brandon. Unlike quocnt I probably don’t need multi-site (since I only will have 2-3 sites). At what point ( i.e. how many sites) before one should consider using multi-site? It would be a big advantage to share one database, if that is possible.

Thanks so much Brandon! As a result of your remarks and considering tradeoffs, I plan on developing live using test site subdirs, and Backup Buddy to migrate from the testsite dirs to the actual domain.

But I’d be curious. Do you have a ‘guess’ as to how much your development work would speed up if you were to work locally? Do you think it would be significant?

“development server” is a new concept for me. It sounds like a non-local server with SVN or something on it. Is that what it is?

It sounds like you use FTP to copy everything to your live site. True?

Thanks so much for the response Michael, I appreciate it!