The ability to fully simulate your latest creation in a staging environment is what separates the best from the rest. Once endowed with such powers, publishing to a live site just to see how it looks seems about as smart as dipping your finger into boiling water to see if it’s the right temperature. Staging environments are not simple though – they require a unique install of Wordpress, a file comparison interface and a bunch of other things. Plug-in’s are a powerful thing but cloning the entire structure of it’s parent is not something plug-ins are capable of. If you run your Wordpress install from something other than a server you have full control over, setting up a staging environment is a near impossibility. Most Wordpress users don’t run their own server let alone know what “Apache” really is.
There is hope though! You can use Wordpress’s “preview” powers to create your own quick and dirty staging environment.
