CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have read the migration instructions at http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location and it talks about rebuilding absolute path menus, implying that these are in a database table.  I was hoping to create a test instance of drupal-civicrm in a separate directory, running off the same database as production, so I could test theme changes and upgrades before going live (assuming the db mainly contains content). It seems to me now that this is not going to be possible.  Could someone confirm please, or am I missing a trick?

Thanks for the confirmation.  Would this not be a good thing to do, is it worth putting it in a wish-list somewhere (where?).  If I have 2 separate sites I need to replicate content changes which means a whole lot more maintenance.  I thought the reason to have params like the base url in config files was so that everything else would be relative to that and so be context independent..?