I've been dipping my toe into web development technologies for fun (ya, i should get out more), and am a little shocked at the lack of clear support for production staging (i.e. development, testing, performance, and production environments). Actually support isn't the word; Content Management Systems seem to actively work against efforts to allow for clean staging.

Currently I am using Drupal. I have had a very hard time finding how the community solves this problem. Most of the posts I've seen recommend reproducing the steps done in development on the production system (reading this actually shortened my life a small bit). I also hear of pushing production data back to the developers so they can add incremental features. This can't be the way to go, what if the client doesn't want you pulling their data back to your development environment?

So finally my question:

How are you managing real world production staging issues for a CMS?

I come from a background where pushing to production feels like sending people to the moon, so I may need to relax a little bit. However I am still interested answers that involve source control, allow for production rollback, and testing.