This chapter marks a significant turning point for us in this book. Up until now, we have only discussed development issues (more or less). For the next four chapters, we will only discuss deployment/maintenance issues (more or less).
Do you remember the site administration diagram, located at the beginning of Chapter 1? A fair amount of development tasks have now been covered, so we can now switch to deployment/maintenance tasks with confidence, knowing that we understand what the various development tasks look like. Also, remember that in the real world, you are likely to have deployed to staging numerous times before deploying to production.
In a way, you have already been prepared for what is coming next. By demonstrating Buildout's ability to extend configuration files, we have (hopefully) shown that a production buildout is just a buildout configuration file(s) that configures the site for production use.
In some cases, a production buildout may get...