One of the more difficult aspects of professional Drupal site management is that there is not a very good way to move code/templates/content changes form the dev/staging environment to a production environment that has been in continuous use during your development cycle.
I took a break from a long session yesterday morning and decided to mingle a bit, and I met Earnest Berry from Work Habit. He has taken over the development of a set of modules called AutoPilot It is a build/change management system that allows you to create a build that integrates database changes, subversion/cvs changes, feature set and custom scripting changes. Earnest took some time to talk to me about the upcoming release and even gave me a 15 minute demo of how the system works. This looks to be a very promising “upgrade” to how you can manage your Drupal site for it’s entire life cycle which would likely contain many releases.
In addition to using AutoPilot to manage your site builds & releases, I can see many places where our very own Phase2 Site Builder module (for automatic provisioning of new Virtual hosts) can be integrated to provide a full service site deployment and management system. Hopefully, I can work with Earnest in the coming month to help bring these tools to the Drupal platform.