stage

It's gotten to the point I've realized I should stop mucking around with features on our live site and create a stage or development site.

This seems tricky with a newspaper, though, because if you work on the stage for a week and then just move it live, you're wiping out a week's worth of uploaded content.

What are you using for moving features, etc from stage to production?

Problem

To me a staging server is one where I try new modules, make settings changes, and otherwise screw around with the data structures. A production server holds the content, interacts with my users, etc.

My problem is when I need to create a staging server (by dumping the production server database) it immediately goes out of sync with the production server.