Original Message:
From: Ray Zimmerman <rz10@cornell.edu>
...
Isn't this an issue for lots of people? I find I'm always making 
copies of my site (throw my whole installation in a new directory and
point it to a duplicate of the database) to play around with new
features. Doesn't everyone do this?  :-)  How can I do it without it
breaking all the internal links in my content?
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Well, it was an issue for me, too.  What I ended up doing was a combination of $base_url, .htaccess and relative addressing.

I found that $base_url was only 1/2 the issue.  In addition, I needed a RewriteBase line in my .htaccess file.

Finally, I made all of my links relative to the current displayed page.  If the current page was www.mysite.com/level1/level2/mypage, then I would crawl up to the root, and then use the other page's true url_alias.

This does not work if you have direct links in specific content which shows up on multiple pages at different depths.  Luckily, I don't have any of those (see Dashboard for an example of how one node might be used to build another).