BuddyPress.org

It’s tricky. I agree. I might register a subdomain for staging (say dev.mydomain.com) and get everything good to go there. I would not use a folder on production. BuddyPress isn’t happy living in a folder and I think it would be more of a pain to go live. If you use a subdomain, switch the domain over to http://www.mydomain.com when you’re ready to go live. But things will have to be changed in the DB (mostly in the wp_sitemeta table but also in a few other tables I think) and in the wp-config file.

But I’m no networking genius. So don’t listen to me!!! I’m mostly a designer / html guy. Maybe others have better ideas of how to manage development.