James,
Sorry for the trouble posting. My membership plugin is fighting with the forum. It’s hiding the top post in each topic from everyone but me. The membership plugin are supposedly working on a solution. Hopefully there will be one soon.
Good question about the links. WordPress will generate absolute links for everything based on the URL’s that are set for the site in your general settings (Settings section of your control panel and then general). The good thing about that is any links that are generated by WordPress will be automatically updated once those are changed.
So if you’re inserting an image from the media browser into a page, when you move your site, the path to that image should be updated automatically once the site URL is changed.
The only ones that won’t automatically update are any hard coded URL’s or ones inside theme options. In those cases, the URL’s will need to be updated to reflect the new domain once the move is made.
You can use a plugin like BackupBuddy that will handle the import/export of your site from one domain to another. It can update everything for you automatically which is a nice option. I’ve used it to move quite a few sites over the years.
Lots of people have been raving about WP Migrate Database Pro (http://deliciousbrains.com/wp-migrate-db-pro/) which might also be a good option.
I hope that helps out. If you have any questions, just let me know.
Have a great week,
Bill