[Zope] Defensive Zope Development

[Dan Shafer]

After my recent versioning fiasco, which I was able to solve with the help 
of the great folks on this list, it seemed to me that I need to re-think my 
one-instance-fits-all approach to Zope development. This was too scary. My 
entire Zope instance, complete with multiple virtual hosts I'm building and 
maintaining for clients, was inoperable for almost two days while I battled 
the problem.

So what is the preferred/recommended best practice for Zope development? Do I:

1. Stay with versioning, backing up my Zope sites more often and living 
with rough edges (or my mistakes)?
2. Create a second Zope instance, perhaps on my local drive (Win2K) and 
only upload revised objects after proving them locally?
3. Use some other brilliant strategy I haven't thought of?

I'm sure this is a recurring issue. It's probably been talked about on this 
list before, though I *did* search the archives and not find anything 
illuminating.