Develop store offline?

[dbltoe]

A quick Google search of "site:www.zen-cart.com Fantastico Problems" will show you 182 reported problems. No telling how many went unreported. Fantastico is often manipulated by the host and seldom installs a truly correct/complete Zen Cart Version.

As to local development... Unless you possess a direct 20Mbp pipe to the host, you can see and do everything locally, instantly, and without bots getting bad information that will turn off a customer.

If you are able to turn off prying eyes and don't mind the delays and possible FTP glitches, go for it online.

[BlindSide]

Personally I just set up a mirror dev site on a different subdomain, e.g. www.example.com and dev.example.com.

Making sure it's not listed in Google is usually enough, but there are several ways you can even filter out visitors based on IP address, thereby preventing anyone BUT you from viewing that dev site.

[LisaK]

A quick Google search of "site:www.zen-cart.com Fantastico Problems" will show you 182 reported problems. No telling how many went unreported. Fantastico is often manipulated by the host and seldom installs a truly correct/complete Zen Cart Version.

As to local development... Unless you possess a direct 20Mbp pipe to the host, you can see and do everything locally, instantly, and without bots getting bad information that will turn off a customer.

If you are able to turn off prying eyes and don't mind the delays and possible FTP glitches, go for it online.

Hmm...I'm just not understanding why there isn't a plugin like the WP- Maintenance Wordpress Plugin....it makes life so much easier! It turns off the site for everyone who isn't logged in as an admin.

I have looked everywhere for something like this for Zen Cart. Anyways... so the main reason for people developing offline is really then to keep google from indexing unfinished info and stop customers browsing around when they shouldn't? No technical reasons in particular?

Thanks so much for your reply!
Lisa