Modifying a domain usingf WHM

[trigger hippy]

I am trying to find a good working practice as something is going wrong at the moment...

When developing a site, I use a developement domain name - I have bought livetest1.co.uk
Clients like this as it is easy to use. This is a hangover from using a previous system that worked differently.

When I set-up the developement domain, I tend to use the real usernames and passwords that I am going to use later.

Once the site is ready to go live, I use 'modify account' to change the domain name to the new domain.

The reason I do it this way rather than using the ~username method of accessing it (which may be easier) is because in PHP when using ~username to access a site the Global variable in PHP $DOCUMENT_ROOT is not set correctly and I use this a lot.

When I changed an account recently from the developement domain to the live domain, WHM made a big mess of it - the <VirtualHost> container ended up without a user attached to us (I am running phpsuexec so it should have), and it apparently created it twice and goodness knows what else.

Is this a bad practise, did I do something to offend WHM, or is it too hard to tell? Any comments gratefully received.