I am absolute novice with Drupal but have used host provided WYSIWYG editors to create static websites. They made it easy to download the website creation software and create pages and test them before they were published. I desperately want to use Drupal to create a dynamic website from scratch but the learning curve to just get it installed properly is huge.
I am trying to think through the process of moving from development to test to publish, and would like to know if you think I am going in the right direction before I invest more time in learning how to set this up.
As I see it, all development, upgrades, fixes and initial testing should be done on my computer (localhost) first, next stage is move code to test site on host server in order to test it in that environment, and only after good testing on host server would changes be put on production (live) site. I can envision problems keeping track of versions and fixes to my code, so am trying to think through how best to accomplish this.
I am studying an IBM document that explains how to set up an IDE using Eclipse, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Drupal of course. Revision control can be handled by CVS or Subversion, which if I understand correctly is provided through Eclipse.