Chris Green cl@isbd.net
I've now discovered that it is horrendously awful to move it to another domain! Not only are links in WordPress absolute but there are also loads of database entries which have the absolute URL in them.
It sounds like something has been putting absolute links in the database when usually only relative URLs are used. I've moved lots of WordPress sites between domains (for work - http://www.software.coop/products/web/social/ ) and it's not been too bad.
So one has to fix all the links in pages one has created *and* one has to search through the database and fix URLs there too. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!
I think I had one move which had that problem and I fixed it by doing search and replace in mysql. Not great but it worked.
Setting the 'WordPress Address' and the 'Site Address' on the dashboard settings page only fixes URLs generated by the code (i.e. the menu links to pages).
Most URLs should be generated by the code. It really sounds like something is wrong on your WordPress. Maybe a bad plugin?
Apart from anything else it makes doing maintenance/development a nightmare.
Is there any way around this or is the only approach for maintenance to have two parallel sites one 'development' and one 'live' where one tries out changes on the development site and then repeats them (hopefully correctly) on the live site.
As far as possible, use the theme and plugin systems and try not to hack the core. Most things can be done through them.
I did hack the 2.8 core because some things we wanted couldn't be done with plugins, but kept it under git control so it wasn't too bad.
Hope that helps,