Directory placement

[eluser]markwatson[/eluser]
Can't you just make something like public_html_dev and public_html_live, and then just change your web server to use the different roots for production or development?

Honestly tho, I don't get what you're trying to do... But why don't you use subversion or git and then just do branches for development/testing versions of the site? Then you can store all your files in a normal CI dir structure and deploy easily. BAM. everything will work magically :-p