I'm sure that this is probably an FAQ, but ideally, I'd like to be able to do all my development locally and periodically roll out changes & new features, but my very basic question is:

• How do I do that without clobbering my live installation?

I guess I'm having some trouble with getting the workflow concepts straight in my head, since I'd hate to accidentally whack all my user accounts by doing a bulk upload of my local development files, db, etc. (which i won't do. don't worry.).

Or does it make sense to develop in this fashion? Or does it make more sense to go ahead and make the changes on the live installation, but make them visible only to admin or tester-level accounts? What problems would be lurking if we followed that methodology?

And then there's the problem of new modules, etc. that I need to create... I'm assuming that the best thing to do there is to develop those locally, then deploy them to the live server.

I guess I'm just interested in finding out what the best practices are in this scenario, but I'm getting a little muddled now.

What do most DNN developers do?