Post DrupalCon 2007 best practices for management of site development

Hello all.

awebfactory has been hired by Initsoft to write a state of the art document on best practices for web site development management.

I am defining "web site development management" (which is ongoing throughout the life cycle of a web site) as the following:

"Management of distributed development, testing and production environments and process for a multi-tiered web application based on the Drupal (http://drupal.org) framework. This must include simultaneous and integrated procedures for both content based revision management (as part of production functionality) as well as for site (content, users, configuration) branching and merging for development and testing purposes (to allow for ongoing implementation of functionality on all levels)."

One of the biggest difficulties historically in this area is how to use a combination of build and version control tools so as to provide integration of parrallel sites, where development of functionality (modules, themes, configuration...) is going on in one and content is being added and modified in another (production) site.

Since the findings will be of interest to the community as a whole, I am filing this request for feedback on new developments in this area.

My investigation will center on autopilot, DAST, civic labs packaging system, and forum development mailing list best practices suggestions centering on install profile and module install files.

Since I do not wish to waste anyone's time with redundant discussions, my basic question is, what news has there been over the past few weeks since DrupalCon 2007 on best practices and available tools (and their updates)? What fresh contributions and/or experiences would anyone be willing to share?

thanks,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar