First off, a pre-thank you for any help, and a pre-thank you for not telling me to use Google or the search feature.

I just have a quick question on the optimal setup for starting out with DotNetNuke. I am used to things like Drupal/Joomla where it was as simple as setting up a WAMP and then copying an install directory and database to a live server when I was ready to deploy.

What my question is... I want to set up two environments, one for development and testing, and then one for actually hosting the site. How difficult is it to keep these two absolutely separate. Am I going to have a difficult time getting everything to the live server? What my aim is, is to set up a SVN repository for my development environment, so that I can test things from home and work, and then export out and push to my live server when everything works.

My key reasoning for doing this is to keep a clean database and file structure. If things do not work, I can always revision back, or just do a new install and not have lost anything on the live database, etc. I may be over thinking things here, and if so let me know please.

Also as far as the visual studio started kit, is it advised, I noticed in the topic at the top of this forum category that people have had trouble with it in the past. If I do a normal install on my development environment, are there any steps of the install that I can skip since this is just a local development install?

Thanks again for any assistance/guidance.

Thanks for your reply Westa, what you said made more sense immediately. My original thinking was an attempt to be lazy, and have an environment that I did not have to fully set up to test and build the initial site on and then just push it to live once it is "finished". I've decided to set up a laptop that I purchased just for the reason of simply having one a few months ago, and just develop it on that fully and then push to my live set-up. Then for any newly added modules I will do what you have suggested. Copy my live server, test the new modules/code locally here and then add in the changes to the live server.