[development] Multi-instance Drupal Deployment

[Steven Surowiec]

Hello all,
    I've using Drupal at lot at work lately and have some pretty big 
Drupal projects coming up and have been facing the same problem with all 
of the previous projects that I would like to get worked out before 
these new ones get going. And that is handling Drupal deployment in a 
multi-instance environment (multiple developers with local installs, a 
singular development server, a staging server and the production 
server). I can, and currently am, setting up Phing to do most of the 
work for me of handling SVN during the deploys and running any custom 
scripts. But the big hurdle is the database. Particularly the fact that 
there's a lot of admin-editable settings that are stored in various 
database tables. I was wondering if anyone else has had to deal with 
this before and any insight into the problem would help.