Helpful Coder

Somehow I seem to often be in the position where I need to make changes to large, complex, high-traffic sites - changes to the live site that is... Yes, they should have dev/staging servers, but they don't, and I'm not in a position to make them set it up... So changes must be made with a minimum of disruption to the site. Usually the best way to do this is to make a test copy of the page that's going to change and work with that - so that if you break something it doesn't affect the live page. But in some cases this isn't feasible - for one large site a change will involve a cascading set of php files and smarty templates - and I'd have to make copies of all of those, plus change the includes in the right place etc. to make it all work. Then undo all that to make the changes live... Not the best way to set up a system, but that's a topic for another day. So how to minimize disruption? One way I've alluded to before - take advantage of Firebug by putt...