how can I make a "test.domain.com"?
 

I'm revamping my fiance's site http://www.juliegracestudio.com and instead of activating the new theme and working on the site, then activating the old theme again, I've seen someone somewhere who had a "test.hisdomain.com" set up online and I wasn't sure how to go about doing that. If I could do that, It would be much more efficient.

I use Theme Test Drive to work on a site. You can set up the test drive to use the new theme (Atahualpa) and edit the theme options but the users will see the live theme. The only issues are sidebars. If you change which sidebars the widgets are in it will affect your live theme. What I did was work mostly on layout color, and images etc. and then after switching themes officially I put the widgets into the proper sidebars. It worked quite nicely for one of my sites.

I was able to create a "sub" domain in the cpanel for my hosting. so I've got a totally serparate wordpress install going there for laying the site out. I suppose once I'm ready to make it live, I can just more or less copy the ata theme folder over to the correct location and activate it from there.

I've never done it that way and wonder how that works with the database. I may have to test sometime and someone else sees these posts and can chime in.

Seemed pretty simple, basically, I created a sub domain of "test" which in turn created a folder structure like "/home/test/" and then I installed wordpress to it and that was it. the current site is stored at www.juliegracestudio.com and the test site is stored at test.juliegracestudio.com/test/ which is technically www.juliegracestudio.com/home/test/ but somehow it auto redirects or something. so what I have is basically a copy of the whole site wordpress and all in a child folder.

remember, the database you are ysing is controled by what is in wp-config.php. I would NEVER use the same DB for test and PROD because data put in one would effect the other!!

Nix my previous post. My brain must not have been in gear. I am reverting back to my previous suggestion of using the Theme Test Drive plugin. The Atahualpa settings reside in the Db and as JD said you NEVER want to use the same Db for Test and Prod sites.

Creating the subdomain is indeed simple. Moving it to the proper location is less so.