It's quite common in sites- you have a "demo" version with a guest account full of data/posts/comments that you can play with, and all the data is reset every few hours so users wont spam the demo site.
I thought to have another rails environment, "mysite_demo" and use a cron job to call rake to reset it's database every X hours, and populate the seed data.
Then it hit me that all over my app I'll have to check if I'm running in "demo-mode": For example, if the demo site has a login/register page too, a user might register, insert some data and wonder why his account is deleted after he logged in again.. so demosite shouldn't have a register option at all.
So I thought I'll make a "demo" branch of the code.. with the difference and just merge changes as I go... sounds like an overkill.
ideas?
In my application I started with a fixed demo user with an account that resets every hour. Something about that model didn't quite sit right - if there were multiple users hitting the demo at the same time you could get into some weird concurrency issues. And what if a user is in the middle of a demo and your reset the demo account? What happens?
I don't know if this model works for you but I ended up creating a brand new user account with a demo flag set in the database - I also automatically log the user in. This way the user gets to play around for as long as they like and I don't have to worry about data getting deleted/changed while a user demos my app. I run a cron job every night that deletes users with the demo flag set that are older than 24 hours.