Managing the codebase is straightforward -- that's what git's designed for. My question was more about the actual site contents, which will reside in the database. Can you use git for tracking changes to the contents?
not always, often stuff is stored in the db that we want to work on in dev then deploy to production.
but it would be nice to be able to export a selection of nodes to code and preserve there id's, content and metadata. maybe you'll find a features contrib mod http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/11478 but i've never heard of one.
No, git will not track database changes. Features however can handle much of the configuration (that is typically contained in the database) in code, which can then be managed with git.
If you want to create content on your dev or staging site and push it to production, check out the deploy module:
http://drupal.org/project/deploy
Probably not. You're better off logging your MySQL queries and filtering out the UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE queries for the tables you're interested in.
I would advise against that. There are too many places in he mess of tables of data configuration that might refer to specific auto-increment id columns were things will get out of sync. Basically you are trying to do MySQL replication on specific tables only, but there are too many relationships among all the tables.
If it is a small amount of content, such as a handful of pages for a brochure site, putting them in a feature might be best.
If it is a site where customers or visitors generate content on the site, then periodically re-initialize your dev and staging environments with copies of the live DB, running it through a script to anonymize all the user info and change passwords and etc.
If you want to create content on your dev and move it live, then doing a full database copy and moving it live, with settings that are particular to live overridden in settings.php, is probably the best way. I advise against this, basically you are re-launching the site for every change.
If you are truely desiring to be able to create content in multiple different places and move it to live, then probably the best thing to do explicitly program and configure for that, by specifying feeds of the content and setting up the different sites to ingest each other's feeds.
