How do you deal with the lack of a versioning system?

Let me begin by saying that I realize versioning support is on the dev team’s radar and is coming as soon as possible . I also realize that it is tricky to implement and would be the last person to rag on the excellent team for not having accomplished it already.

Until that happy day when versioning support is a reality, how are people working around it?

The only way I can think of to make edits to an existing page and preview them before the world does is to make a copy of the page and edit that, then paste the changes back into the original when happy.

Messy, very messy.

Any alternate approaches?

I use Revo and file based chunks solution to avoid copy/paste as much as possible on development.
Then i switch to db based chunks/resources for production easily with great help from the package management system.

Help me understand this better, please.

If the client says, "Hey, let me see how my homepage would look with this picture of my sister’s cat" how would you make the change temporarily without showing the client’s sister’s cat’s mug to the world?

Do I take it that nobody can propound a solid workaround? Isn’t this a pretty major issue for everybody or is it just me?

It’s not a great solution, but you can put a second install of MODx up somewhere for that kind of testing (say, in a subdirectory). You can synch. the sites with the Provisioner add-on

As usual, Bob, your reply alerts me to something very important - the Provisioner tool. I was unaware of its existence. I already do keep local copies of MODx sites on a server, but have no good way to sync them. Thanks.