WordPress MU

What is the best course of action for implementing a dev server/live server install of WPMU?

What data in the DB and config files is tied to the specific install location? Is everything coded to relative or is anything hard coded to the install location?

In my experience you need to alter a ton of locations in the database as well as the wp-config.php file.

Database places:

* wp_site
* wp_blogs
* the wp_x_options for any blogs you want to test (otherwise their admin links will lead to the live site etc.)

People usually recommend setting up a local server that thinks it has the domain of the live site so that you dont' have to do it all manually. I haven't gotten that to work yet though.

Chang the hosts file on your local computer to the live domain. only you will see your local install at the "real" domain.

This seems like it might be a good place to improve WPMU. That is, just use the setting in wp-config.php and not store the domain anywhere else. (Easier said than done, I know...)

What data in the DB and config files is tied to the specific install location? Is everything coded to relative or is anything hard coded to the install location?

The FQDN URL is stored everywhere in WordPress. The server configuration, every site definition, even every picture in every post.

At my shop we don't worry about having an exact mirror of dev/production for content. We do for code and we use SVN for managing that. For content, we can deploy a new staging server instance with SVN in seconds, content people can build a site on that and then export it and import it onto the production server.