Creating a test site with the production database?
 

Hi,
We recently took over a relatively active forum (~20K members), and we're planning some neat modifications and additions. First up: some redesigning of the theme to match our other web properties. Sadly, I'm a total newbie to vBulletin so am doing this mostly in the dark.

My specific question mostly revolves around:
* Can I set up a private ourdomain.com/beta-forum/ vBulletin that uses the SAME database as our production ourdomain.com/forum, and simply change the styling? Or is the styling set in the database?
* If I can do this, is it as simple as running "cp ./forum ./beta-forum" and then editing my templates using /beta-forum/admincp?

What I'm looking for is a way to get a REAL idea of exactly how the forum will change with the new styling? The production content seems to be the best way to do this, but perhaps there's a better way I'm missing?

Thanks!