I am planning a major change on my site and am wondering if there is a way to work on the new site on my local computer and keep my current site running until I replace it with the finalized new version. Is this possible? If so, how? I searched the forum but couldn't find any info.

Thanks All!
Emily

Well first off you have to have wamp or mamp running on your local computer, and if you don't know what they are, you probably don't want to do it.

You could install a second copy of wordpress in a subfolder of your host and create a Ned database, then export the current database and import it into the new one. this way if your site was your domain.com and the new wordpress install was in a folder called mytest, you would enter your domain.com/mytest to get to the test site.

You need to change the blog and home url's in the wp-options table but it is doable. then you could export the style from the test site and import it into the live site.

That's what I did! I made a folder (demo), loaded wordpress in there, and worked at it that way. I also have now added a "maintenance mode" plugin that allows me to work on it without people snooping at it. :-D

Worked good for me!

Warmly,

Velma

make sure to have two databases - one live and one test- and make sure teh wp-config.php points to the right one. You wouldn't want to be testing along changing things about and then realize you had been changing the live database

BACKUP!!! BACKUP!!! BACKUP!!!!