Deployment strategies for Drupal 6?

Hi folks --

I've been searching Google and the forums to no avail: does anyone have a working strategy for managing development, staging, and production environments with Drupal 6?

The only solution I've seen out there uses Capistrano, which is simply not an option for me, at least for this project (additional learning curve aside, the client is on shared hosting that doesn't offer Ruby support).

What strategies have people been using to handle this scenario?

Thanks!