We are redesigning our site at the moment. Most of the redesign has taken place on our development server, but at some stage we would like to test the new site design on the live server with some trusted users. We can use the same database as the site changes are to the layout and HTML only.

I have tried to set up a separate hostname for the test site and duplicate the whole cgi-bin directory. This doesn't seem to work as changes made to the test domain paths and templates also occur on the main domain. I thought the settings were stored in the Data.pm file but obviously I am missing something important .

Would it be easier to just setup a separate template directory and then configure the test site to use that? We run a dynamic site with static URLs but I'm not sure if it's possible to pass the template via the mod_rewrite commands.

Any suggestions on how we can do this would be appreciated.