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The above link: http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Moving_WordPress does not adequately answer your question, and it seems that almost all the responses provide this same answer given over and over again. Unfortunately, the codex article only addresses the simplest of WordPress installations.

The issue is a best practice approach to a site design methodology that is typically used in most commercial site deployments. Like you, we are seeking recommendations to successfully migrate complex WordPress sites within a domain from the development environment (subdomain) to a “staging” (testing) environment (another sub-domain) and then to the production (live site) environment (production domain). It would appear that this is still a critical weakness in the WordPress platform as of Version 3.1. There are no documented best practices, there are no utilities or scripts published and WordPress incorporate “absolute” or hard-coded URL links in several places that make migration very, very, frustrating. In a typical commercial environment the site specific variables and links are actively referenced (called) via a global variable declaration file and a dynamic variable declaration file. Until this capability is incorporated to support advanced user needs … the developer is stuck manually editing each and every config file, theme and content file.

If anyone has found a best practice approach to address this site development and migration issue… Please, please reply. Other post of this nature have simply been closed without any answers and marked as “unresolved”.