As others said, you either use symlinks (which forces you to have two directories per site), or the new sites.php feature of Drupal 7.
Using that, you can have a contrived name for each site (even site1, site2, or an md5 hash for each site), and redirect the site in it.
The trick is to not use sites/default for each site from now on, and only use a unique identifier. That identifier can be the same when you develop the site, and remains the same when you deploy the site.
Storing a file's path which may change in the future inside the database is a bug no matter what the use case is.
I had once developed a site and then decided to move the files from sites/default/ to sites/<domain-name>/ in order to create a new site using the same installation and was very surprised at seeing this bug. The path is stored in the files and users table (for profile pics) I believe.--
On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Kathleen Murtagh <kathleen@ceardach.com> wrote:I don't use multisite for managing dev, staging and production environments. In my workflow, it would be *more* complicated to use this method. I put the entirety of Drupal core into version control and deploy working spaces straight from version control. This makes it much easier to control exactly what and when code is pushed to production, and enable the ability navigate through the history to find sources of bugs.On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 5:54 PM, Bevan Rudge <bevan@civicactions.com> wrote:At CivicActions we have a tool (pushdb --xFix) that fixes the paths in
the files directory and elsewhere in the db, which we run when copying
an instance of the site to a staging environment. However this
approach is becoming unsustainable and we are considering using a
separate instances of Drupal core in each and every staging
environment so that they all use sites/default.
What this means is that much of the time this featurebug is such a
PITA that Drupal's multisite features don't work for staging
environments. In my own sandbox I don't use multisite for staging
environments at all, because of this issue, Do others?
The only time I use multisite is for actual separate, yet integrated websites. The most common use for me are multiple websites that share tables, like the user-related tables.
Ashraf Amayreh
http://aamayreh.org