: What's a good method for testing out a new web page for just a small set of users? I'm wanting to test out a few new pages and have just a small set of beta testing users be able to
I'm wanting to test out a few new pages and have just a small set of beta testing users be able to access them before I allow them to go live to the rest of the site. What I've typically done is created pages with no links and just give those URLs to users to try out to give feedback. This has worked great for just text articles for proofreading. However, I'm about to install a chat plugin and there's no way to test this on a localhost install and test it effectively.
The way I do functionality improvements now is to have my beta testers ready, install the plugin live, and then test/coordinate this as quickly as possible so it can be removed if it functions poorly or allowed to stay live. This is crazy stressful to me.
I've thought of ideas like buying a garbage test domain (www.asfdsjkfsda.com), and cloning my site to it, and then allowing testing there. Effective/clever or not, it still seems like a ridiculous idea.
Is there a better way to test new functionality for a beta group? Is this really the way things are done?
More posts by @Karen161
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Personally, I utilize my database's users table.
# fname lname email beta_access username [...]
1 James Doe jdoe@email.com true jdoe
2 Sally Jones sj@aol.com true sjones
3 Alex Jennings aj123@yahoo.com false ajennings
Using the above example, there are three random users. In your code, you can simply have an if statement to represent beta_access = true. If true, show beta code. If false, do not.
A second method, which I have done on larger sites, is to have a unique ID in the beta_access column. For example:
# [...] beta_access [...]
1 14573
2 57232
3 14573
4 [null]
This way, you can have multiple things you'd like tested at once, but not grant access to each for all users with beta access. Live chat might be represented by 14573, whereas a new contact form UI might be represented by 57232. This is a bit overboard for simple applications, but is quite useful for larger sites.
I would assume users have to login. Use their id after login to only allow your beta testers on those pages you are testing.
If they don't have to login, you could still make a quick login gateway for your pages that need testing.
psuedo code
If(loginID == "..." or loginID=="..." or loginID=="...")
{
let them in
}
else
{
send them elsewhere
}
or
if(password !="motorcycleMama")
{
send them elswewhere
}
This is how I would do it for your specific example.
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