This may not be possible in the manner in which I'm approaching it, but I have an existing forum set up and working perfectly. I do need to update it with the latest version (I'musing 2.1.2 - and am a little afraid to update right now) but I am going to be adding a link to another site from the main page of the Yaf.net forums. In order to do that, I want to set up a test environment that is virtually identical to my existing (and working) forums site.

The current forums are setup as a sub-directory to my main website. I downloaded all the code from my existing forums to a new directory on my hosting service, and (of course) it doesn't work when I try to load the forums in the new test environment. I get a parser error:

I'm thinking it's because the new forum test environment isn't connected to a database. Any suggestions on how I can connect it to the current DB? Even though it's a test site, It's okay to use the "real" database because no new members are going to be added, it is strictly for testing connections and login's.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Did You set up the foider as IIS Application with an APP pool set to ASP.NET 4?