Safe Modding

Truestar · Moderator

Well, being the newbie Admin I am I constantly mess up my boards. Laughing

And I've recently started that Cultures forum I've been dreaming of starting, so I would really like to not mess this one up.

How do you safely mod? Recently I've set up another folder on my computer called "Unstable MOD Files". This is where I put my modified files until I know they work okay. I've found this pretty good so far. But Is there a better way? How do you safely mod you communities?
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dojo · Posted: 2/13/2006, 3:14 am Post subject:

Well I have a copy of the forums on my PC and use a local server (I have installed Phpdev and it offers me a local server to test). I used this a lot when starting modding.

Now I find my self more reckless and I just backup my DB and the files to be modded. If I am not please with the mod, I just revert to the pages as they were before modding them.
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Thoul · Posted: 2/13/2006, 7:14 pm Post subject:

I'm much like dojo - I have a local server where I used to test things, but lately I've been doing all my work on the real thing. I'm not sure if I'm being reckless or just relying on my greater experience to notice things before they go wrong. Probably reckless. Laughing

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Ex0dus · Posted: 2/13/2006, 8:38 pm Post subject:

I never could run things off of my computer, so i make multiple copies of my board (seeing as though its a premod thats easy enough to do).

I use the other copies for various things (styles development, php coding development, and soon translation development) and for the most part it works out fine ^_>

Having multiple copies somewhere is the safest way to go whether it be on your computer or on the web.

-Ex0dus

Queen.Zeal · Posted: 2/14/2006, 3:36 am Post subject:

I find EasyMOD eliminates a lot of careless mistakes. say I was supposed to find the following:

a
b
c

and replace it with:

d

What if, while selecting all those lines with your mouse or whatever, you miss one? Sometimes tracking down that one error can be rather time consuming. That's where EasyMOD comes in.

~HG~ · Posted: 2/18/2006, 5:03 pm Post subject:

I tend to do mine by hand as it gives you a real opportunity to read and understand the code you are using and at the same time get some insight into what it will do.

A great way to learn.

I too used to mess a lot of code up in the beginning but these days I get around it by changing the name of the files on the server side of my ftp client to (say as an example) page_headerBU.php and I do that with all the files that are going to be changed just before I copy the new file to the server.

If anything then fails you can delete the new files one by one and change the BU copy back to it's original title and at least that way, you can narrow down where the problem is.

It wont always work but it will work 99% of the time.

The other 1% I have to call on Thoul for help hehehehe
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Nick · Posted: 2/18/2006, 7:29 pm Post subject: