On the Fortrabbit.com blog, there's a new post looking at a system for multi-stage deployment at a high level, applicable to most of the tools out there.

This article targets new developers and developers which never had the chance working with multi versioned websites before. If this fit’s you: Read it. Staging is a good tool in your belt you won’t regret to know. [...] You, your co-developers, authors and whatnot using [staging] to prepare and test stuff which is to be released into production. In short: you do not perform open-heart surgery by coding directly on the production website.

He talks about the "stages" part of the "multi-stage" structure, mentioning the separation of purpose they provide and an example of a three level configuration (dev, staging, production). An optional fourth level can be added as well for testing purposes. There are some downsides to this approach, though: data synchronization, code deployment delay and complexity. There's also a mention of gitflow and how it could help make this environment easier to set up for your applications.