sounds more like a structuring problem.
Heres how I typically structure my directories
/www/prod/ -- production level scripts
/www/prod/SSI/ -- production level includes
/www/prod/images/ -- production level images
/www/dev/ --- development level scripts
/www/dev/SSI/ -- development level includes
/www/dev/images/ -- development level images
/www/arch/ -- archived scripts
/www/arch/SSI/ -- archived includes
/www/arch/images/ -- archived images
This way I can keep all my references relative and when its time to take the development to production I simply need to copy my /prod dir to /arch in order to archive everything, and then copy /dev to /prod to go live.