We are creating our main website and slave sites on a developer server at www.ourdevdomain.com. When we go live in 2 weeks, we will switch the domain to www.ourclientsdomain.com.

Right now our slave sites are subdomain.ourdevdomain.com.
They will then be subdomain.ourclientsdomain.com.

This is all being handled through the DNS settings on the server.

My question is, what relevance does the list of domains in JMS have to slave sites? That list doesn't handle routing in any way, because that is done through DNS, so what is the list for? What does it do?

I need to know so that if we need to change those on go-live I need to work that in our launch strategy.

THANKS!!

Domain list is a list of somain that you associate to a mnemonic (the site id).
You can assign several domain to a same website.
In general the list is minmum of 2 domains.
The one with the "www" and without www.

Here it is an example of domain list with 2 domains:
www.domain.com
domain.com

This allow to create websites synonyms.

The domain list give the list of domain associated to a JMS site id.
When the Site ID is retreived, JMS is able to retreive the JMS configuratoin and therefore the DB connection and all the settings required by Joomla.
So the domain list drive JMS to the appropriate DB and therefore to the appropriate content and layout.

If you have developped and tested the new website on the master, you will just have to add or replace the list of domain with the new domain.

We also have customers that are using JMS to create different version of their website and when the website is ready, they just change the list of domain to switch to the new website