I'm not sure as to teh wisdom of using the same database for what is in the end two portals. What you said was that you didn't want your users to mess up your production portal, so you were giving them a test one.

If you have both portals access the same database, altering data on one portal will inevitably be changing it on the other portal, therefore not achieving your objective.

You can have two databases on the same database server, even if hosted externally. This of course depends on whether your hosting company will allow more than one database.

I guess an alternative is to setup another url pointing to the same server, and setup that as a second portal. As to how your'd replicate the data, I'm guessing you'd have to do load of work duplicating data in each individual table, and set up the copy as being part of the second portal. Not my idea of fun. But others may be wiser. I'm guessing templates could be used, but I haven't done that at all.

Hope this helps
Roger

OK, skip steps 2,3 & 5.

Should do the job.

Roger

Hmmm got me on that one. As I said, running two portals on one database sounds dangerous, because the file system would be out of sync with the database.

Sorry, this is as far as I can go.

Roger