It's maybe a dumb question, but I have a website, which I want to upgrade. I acquired an Oxygen license, and I wanted to work on that, while the old design is still up. Problem is, that if I activate Oxygen, it will block all the theme's as it's using it's own thing. Therefor, I can't make just a new page and list it private.
I tried to make it on a different wordpress domain, and migrate that to here, though I don't have the money to pay for migration tools and the free ones not usable (either my site is too big, or doesn't support Oxygen's migration). While I was trying a test migration, I encountered different problems, like the databases got entangled, and the admin users changed to the other website's login's credentials. I would like to leave that option out.
Is there a "test realm" or something that I could use, while developing the new site? What is the best practices in such times?
you can copy a site manually without plugins. wordpress is just a bunch of files and a database. zip your main site’s files and unzip them at the new site directory. then export the main site database (with wp-cli or mysqldump) to generate a .sql file and import the .sql to a new database meant for the new site.
open wp-config.php of the new site and change the database details (name, user, credentials). also define the new site and wordpress urls (like [https://test.example.com](https://test.example.com) instead of https://example.com).
if the new domain (test.example.com in this case) is configured at the dns and web server levels, it should now open in the browser as a clone of your main site.
as a last step, disable search indexing on the test site, optionally put it behind http authentication, and replace all mentions of example.com with test.example.com with better search replace or wp-cli.
it may seem complicated if you’re doing it the first time, but it’s fairly straightforward if you can dedicate an hour or two to learn and get it done.
alternately you can also develop your site locally. install [localwp.com](http://localwp.com), copy your main site to a local site and make your changes. once ready move them back to your main site.
Did you maybe try All in one WP migration or Migrate Guru plugins as well?
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>Is there a “test realm” or something that I could use, while developing the new site? What is the best practices in such times?
We usually develop new/redesigned sites on subdomains and after we finish it – we transfer/migrate those sites to a production sites.