Test/Staging servers -- licensing, and migrating changes between machines

[rgitzel]

Hi All,

I'm looking at vB for our current project, and so far so good.

One thing we may need is the ability to set up the board internally for trying things out, for testing features, etc, without bothering the real server that's out in production (i.e. publicly accessible).

First question: do we need a separate license for each machine? It's not a big deal, if so, but I'd like to tell the powers that pay ahead of time.

Second question: is there a reasonable way to "migrate" changes from the test vB installation to the public one? Manually reproducing the changes (from memory, possibly) is not a reliable process.

Simply dumping and restoring the database wouldn't work, we would kill the public users and posts. Are there maybe some particular config tables that could be exported and imported? Then again, ID's for groups, etc, might be different, so straight export/import would be dicey.

Ug.

Or! Is there a way to tag the configuration, make some changes, and then compare them with a given tag? Then at least we'd know all the changes that need to be made manually on the other machine. (Yes, exactly like a version control system.)

Thanks!

rodney

[Wayne Luke]

Our license specifically makes allowance for a private development server so you wouldn't need a second license.

For the most part, the only thing you would have to export would be language and style changes. For this we provide a XML upload/download feature that allows you to migrate from your development server to your test server whenever you make changes to these settings.