How to maintain your development website vs. production website in WordPress?

In a wordpress installation we want to have our main site, and a staging site separated and different. Where in the admin interface you separate your staging area?

Let's say:

for production you will have: http://www.yourdomain.com/

but for staging we want to have: http://www.y开发者_高级运维ourdomain.com/staging

Staging is the website that will be in production next.

Any ideas?

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With Wordpress 3.0+ you might be able to create a network of sites or install multiple sites with an older version of Wordpress. The catch is I don't know of an easy way of moving the staging to production. I'm not entirely sure that will do what you want, but you may want to look into it.

Personally I'd think you'd probably be better off keeping your staging and production sites on 2 different servers and just do a copy over when you move to production.

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I don't know of any instant, simple answers, but have you seen this article in the Wordpress support forum? It has some informed discussion and at-least partial solutions:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/one-wpseveral-servers

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If your staging site doesn't need any database modification, or custom forms/widgets for the backend, you can create a new theme, and test it in the preview mode. When done, you can switch the theme to the new one!