How to copy a WordPress site

My standard practice with Drupal sites is to copy the production site to a test site, and sometimes to a development site and a staging site. It's easy with Drupal. Just copy the database and files, and restore them to the new location, edit the settings file, and you are good to go. Not so easy with WordPress. For some reason, the URL is hard coded in the site database in many places, and in some serialized strings. One module also hard codes the absolute file path. Ugh.

While working on my first Wordpress site, I wanted to copy the site for testing. I ended up hand editing the sql export in order to copy the site to run on a different URL. I found several articles on the WordPress codex, as well as some modules written to make this easier, but they only address the blogs, while my site uses BuddyPress so it has a lot more to be dealt with.

I sure would like an easier way to deal with this. I may end up writing a PHP program to make the changes, as hand editing has its weaknesses: error possibilities, and the obvious time involved.