Moving content from dev directory to production server
Frankly, I have never suffered from any path reference issue that you are describing, speaking of managed files.
As per unmanaged files, which laying around on the ftp server, that you may happen to refer to in raw code or WYSIWYG editors, make sure you don't use absolute paths starting with domain name. Check your WYSIWYG editor settings. Instead, you'd want to:


use links starting with slash - I call them root links
edit the settings.php file and provide an explicit URL of your current site root in the $base_url variable. This is what the root links will refer to as base. Thus, when you move your site to another domain, it should require just changing of that one value.


I'm not sure there is a tool to do global replacements of absolute path you might already have. You could however dig into database and do a global search on it.