A development environment is something you do, when you want to test changes or upgrades to a software application, with out affecting the production or live system.
For instance, the wlug wiki. In the past it was proposed to use test.wlug.org.nz for this:
http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug-committee/2005-August/001015.html
The software that runs the site is in an svn repository here, and anyone can check out the files:
There is some information about past development work here:
http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiPatches
The current committee is planning to create a development environment in a VPS donated by Rimuhosting. This is for preventive maintenance of the site, and to understand how it's setup and what components are needed.
What we know so far, is that it's based on an application PhpWiki, which obviously uses PHP, and uses the Postgres database.
Database dumps are stored here:
http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/wiki/
So far we have a simple cron job that goes and grabs a database dump once a week and stores it on our remote backup server (tarua.wlug.org.nz).
We are looking at checking out the wiki code now. There are other components to the site as well, such as the library manager application, webmail and the planet application. We are just looking at the wiki for now.
One page links to DevEnvironment:
