Best way to develop multisite and deploy on another server?

Question

I have no previous experience in developing multisites so be easy on me. I´m familiar with developing and launching single sites though.

I´m looking for the smoothest way to build a multisite for my client. It doesn't matter if I build locally or on a live development server. The sites will be basically the same but in different language versions, the content will also be slightly different.

I´ve been reading that it´s hard to migrate multisites to new servers because the url:s are hardcoded in the database in another way than on single installs, making search and replace much harder (or impossible?). So how should I go about then?

Develop locally and use the same url as the sites will have at launch, somehow? Use some kind of plugin to migrate multisite? I see Backupbuddy has this as a BETA feature, has anyone tried this?

Any ideas or tips on a good workflow here?

Answer 1

I always develop the webiste locally on my machine with the setup mydomain.dev and using svn or git to save versions of the code. The next step is to put it on a test domain like stage.mydomain.com and after that mydomain.com

I use this to change the url:s in the database: https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

Its a search and replace tool that you put in your WordPress root and just run it from mydomain.dev/searchreplacedb2.php