linear - 3:04 pm on Aug 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

Nothing fancy, just a separate instance of WP where you can try changes out of public view. You'll want to disable the ping features though, which leads me to another feature discussion:

issue: WP pings pingomatic for each new entry by default. This feature exists to alert various RSS aggregators to the presence of a new post on your blog, so they can fetch a feed. Until things are settled, you probably don't want this, and in any case, you probably don't want to expose your dev environment to the feed aggregators. (I have feed aggregators trying to fetch URLs that are long gone because I failed to notice this.)

mitigation: This is pretty easy, just remove the pingomatic URL from the Options > Writing > Update Services section in the admin screens. More detail about this feature is here: [codex.wordpress.org...]

Once things are up and running, you can put this back to get some exposure for your content. This is a nice feature of using WP, but if you don't realize it's on by default, you may inadvertently alert the world to the presence of work that's in-progress.