Moving WP from a staging folder to somewhere else

Hello–

I’m installing wordpress for a site we’re developing at work. The plan is to have the blog in a subdirectory called “blog” but IT wants to stage the blog (as well as the rest of the site) in a restricted-access folder while we get it ready to launch–which includes importing old posts from another blog.

I don’t really know enough about all of this stuff to know whether or not that will be a royal pain in the arse. I know I will probably have to edit the .htaccess—but other than that, will it be as simple as moving everything to the new subdirectory? Will old posts be accessible to the public? Furthermore—is it even possible to work with WordPress if it lives in a restricted-access folder?

Thank you!!
-mydogischelsea