[support] Development Best Practices

Hi folks,

I'm in the process of developing a new Drupal site that will be fairly active when it gets up and running. As such, I'm wanting to have a development site ("HEAD") and a production site ("RELEASE"), but I'm at a bit of a loss for how to keep the databases in sync, preserving the changes I make on the development side, but not overwriting any of the content that may have been added on the production side.

I'm sure others have run into this same problem, and so I'm wondering - are there any "best practices" documents out there to show how others have done it?

I'll keep looking, but thought I'd appeal to the collective wisdom in case I miss anything.

Cheers, Andrew