With Wigwam, publication should not be scary. You should have been able to QA your staging server to the point were you are reasonably sure there are no bugs.
If there are problems once the package has been pushed out to the live server, it should be easy to revert back to the old version.
We recommend setting up staging clusters for debugging publication.

[TODO: explain how publishing works. we do the rsyncing because: we experienced too many hangs and CVS backoffs while each cluster machine waited on the others' locks, thus making publishing take much longer.]