Under construction - development methodology

I'm brand new to Zen Cart, and I'm puzzled by something. Most of the material I have seen for installing and getting started with Zen Cart suggests downloading files to a local machine, doing an unzip, and then ftp'ing the files to your web host server. Configuration and setup then take place on the server. As an application developer, this seems strange to me. Is there no concept of a development/test environment? If I'm developing on production how do I keep people from trying to use my site (e.g., under construction)?

Thanks, Ken

You can upload it to a subdirectory for testing/development. Unless someone knows you have a website, how can they find it? Plus if you have a question or problem, none of us can look at it if it's not somewhere on the net.

I use the files on my local drive to copy/edit the files I need and then upload those to the domain where I'm testing.

In addition, there are ways to set ZC up to run locally. Take a look in the FAQ/tutorials and see if there's info on that.