If you have a high traffic, high income site, you might want to consider to setting up a test blog. It only takes a few minutes to set up a new WordPress installation using Fantastico. You can easily set one up in a sub-folder.The steps that I follow for important blogs are:

• Create a new WordPress installation
• Upload the theme
• Upload the plugins
• Activate and test the behaviour of the plugins - one by one.
• If a plugin is incompatible with the version you’re testing, it might totally disable your installation. The trick is to then simply log onto the test folder using a FTP program, and then delete the plugin, or simply change the plugin file’s exention - say from AdsenseManager.php to AdsenseManager.phpOld. It can be anything added to the PHP extension - and it will disable the plugin.
• If I identify an incompatible plugin, then I do a Google search to see if others have found a solution for the problem. Alternatively, I assess if I can omit the plugin from the site - either just for the short ter, or permanently.
• I also add a few quick test posts. I tend to add a couple of posts with the most complex content (multiple DIV tags / CSS settings) to test if the auto formatting of WordPress breaks anything.

If your site is an important site, the few minutes that it takes to set up a test site could be a wise move.

Using RapidFormatter, it’s pretty quick to set up a test blog that replicates your live site.RapidFormatter not only helps you format a blog to look like a website, it:

• uploads the theme
• uploads the plugins, and
• it automatically sets a number of WordPress settings to change the behaviour of the blog to be like a normal website.

As it’s vital that I test each RNW plugin, I have set up a test blog : http://jeff-w.com/wp25/

The first step was to send a theme to the site - using RapidFormatter. I decided to have a little fun, and create a theme for the upgrade process. After uploading the theme with the built-in FTP capability of RapidFormatter, the over-used Kubrick theme was replaced with a more visually appealing RNW theme :

OK - so far so good - nothing is broken with the actual theme …