How to work on a project with limited access?

It's nice to have a complete project at your disposal to see how an application works when it's modified.

That's in an ideal situation. Now, say you have ftp access to a web site root with all the source files, you're unfamiliar with the site structure, you have no direct a开发者_如何学Pythonccess to the database (so you can only guess the structure...) and the site just happens to be live.

How do you go about adding some features in a context like this?

P.S: Title is a reference to so-called keyhole surgery.

Look through the source files and see if you can find any connection information for the database.

If you're really into dissecting the webpage structure, you can go as far as writing or using a webpage parser and compare the site across its entire set of links. From there, you can pretty much make out the templates, content nodes, etc. Hope it helps.