What are the best practices for releasing code from a development to production server?

http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/998241 gives a decent overview.

My tip is to also track versions of all prod deployments so you know which one was active in production when.

I was using ant, and hated it. What I do now is check in all code into subversion, then if it's ready for release, tag it, then check out the tag directly onto the production server.

Capistrano is very shiny and nice.