[support] Best practices for stage <--> productions

Hi, I have more than 10 years of web admin/dev experience but I am just starting with drupal. I am about to set stage/dev environment for the first project. Both production and stage are Unix(Freebsd), I have full root access. What should be the best practices I should follow. So far I found these: (1) http://drupal.org/project/drush_ctex_bonus (2) http://community.aegirproject.org/ What do you advise for best practices ? Nice to have, but not a must is to be simple for the web developers e.g "press button sync": i.e they do not need to contact for export, they do not need to go under ssh and use git/svn. Thanks, Peter