New Site Development

I’ve been using ModX for a little while and am very pleased with it in general. The site initially was just a private portal used for members to share info and ideas regarding certain projects, and worked very well, but basically was just using the basic ModX install.
Time to move on
I’m at the very early stages of setting up NEW SITE(s) that I hope will be a little more extravagant and utilize ModX to a greater degree.
I have a couple of queries that I hope to get some opinions or answers to:

1) I’ve setup a home server for development using XAMPP, Dreamweaver 8, and of course ModX 0.9.6. Here I can test and try a few things out.
When I am ready to update the online server (Hosting provider) I hope I can simply over ride the existing installation of modx and export/import the SQL database through MySQL and all should be well. (When I’ve got the main site going I hope to do most updating directly online.)
Is there a better way to transfer a site from test server to online? (Including database)

2) I’ve read in a number of posts that there is a limit of 5000 documents with ModX! I suspect I will not need this many for my main site, but a community portal I’m thinking of starting up may well need more if I include history and tourist info etc.
Is the 5000 limit still applicable? Are there any work arounds?

3) Template building - Aaaarrrggghhh! Not my favourite pass time!- I’m in the midst of designing the primary templates using Dreamweaver and its quite easy to incorporate the basics of ModX in to it.
Getting to update the system is quite a challenge though, especially when using other resources, such as graphics, external scripts, CSS etc. Then everything has to be transfered manually through the resource manager etc.
Is there a way ModX can use regular HTML files rather than having to reenter the HTML through the template manager? (It uses external CSS, why not html)

Something for the Wish List - Import HTML. or better still -Import Templates complete.
Dump the WHOLE template in the template folder and away we go!

4) Whens version 1.0 coming!

Keep up the good work.

You can make a snippet that consists of "include assets/templates/MyTemplate/template.html" and put the snippet’s tags in your Manager template. Then you can edit your template file as you like.

1.0 is an arbitrary designation. I personally consider MODx to be more along the lines of a 1.5 or 2.0 product given what we’ve accomplished since the early preview release days.