About thegateway.org:

Recently, while explaining block configurations during our Drupal Essentials training, an observant pupil raised the question,

Recently, while explaining block configurations during our Drupal Essentials training, an observant pupil raised the question, "If we switch themes, do we need to redo all of our block configurations?".

Cloning a production site to your local development environment is super easy. Often you have it in git, or maybe even as a make file. Anyway, you just grab the code and restore the site from a backup_migrate dump.