In this section of our book, we will be discussing why and how to set up a test and development environment. It is vitally important to have a safe place to test your upgrades, additions, code fixes, and so on.
The test and development environment is not glamorous; it is mundane and necessary. It is an established mirror site that is usually not public facing. Often, this is done locally on a server you own, an IDE, or an integrated development environment, to allow you to make mistakes, run tests against it, and so on. At other times, you may have this on a shared host. Either way, you want to mirror the production environment completely.
Why do we want to do this? Well, in our Joomla! environment, we will have a mix of technologies at work, all interoperating together. We have PHP, Apache, Linux, AJAX, HTML, third-party extensions, and possibly other types of coding. They should all work together, right?—No, many times they don...