Staging or Sandbox environments for Business Discourse hosted forums

Installation Hosting
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Continuing the discussion from Exclusive Sandbox or Staging Environs for Orgs?:

A challenge we’ve found with Discourse is the lack of a staging or sandbox environment that is exclusive to our org. We’d like a place where to stage and test any planned changes (especially regarding CSS and component changes) outside of production.

How are other teams handling this with their hosted versions of Discourse?

With testing the CSS… the preview doesn’t work for viewing theme components as they would look alongside other theme components and a certain theme, unless you apply the component to the theme which would then make the change live.

Not giving you the ability to preview how component changes would look on mobile and desktop view under your current theme.

For example… when I preview the versatile banner component this is my view…

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msedge_9GiMyykGF31252×939 134 KB

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Whereas integrated into the live site this is my view…

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D0CMVXAmGj1422×935 111 KB

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The simplest way to do it without a separate Discourse instance would be to create a duplicate of your main theme (make sure you change the name of the duplicate to avoid confusion). You can then add existing components and new changes to the duplicate theme, and preview that without making it live.

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Thank you @awesomerobot. I’ll try this out