Personally, I always deverlop modules locally then package them and deploy them to a staging server on my local network. After it has been tested on a few different versions of DNN (depending on your target) on the staging server I deploy the package to the production (public) server.

I have never tried to publish an entire site and everything I have read suggests that this is NOT the way to go. The concept behind DNN is all based around portable packages of functionality not entire site deployment. I am sure it can be done but there are several challenges in doing so. However, if you MUST deploy "content" that has been tested your best bet might be to do this using SQL scripts.

 WOW!  This is all very interesting to me.   And perhaps equally scarry! 

So, for:

module development: folks are developing locally, testing then if ok, it gets sent to prod.

module implementation (e.g. adding text to text modules, adding photos to photo modules, etc) you are actually doing all of this on production.  Wow.  Is this correct?  So, how do you go about doing this?  I suppose, you can add a new page/module and set the permissions only to the user that is working on that until it's ready to go.  Is this correct?  Is this what everyone is doing / best practice?

Lets use this as an example, it is something that just happened to me right now:  I installed a module to my local dev box, and it it didn't work -- it also caused other modules to fail!!!!  

If you're curious, I'm talking about the ultimate gallery module that is the top listed module on snowcovered (I hope it works ok), but here is what happened.  Their install included 3 files that were no longer needed (I found this out after looking at their help board), why they are shipping this app with files that have been depricated is another question, but I simply deleted them.  The reason why their module was breaking another modules in my portal was due to a namespace collision.  

So, in the above situation, I see why obviously testing the module locally is important, but when it fails -- like this one did -- and I make changes to fix it, is there a way to package the module back up so I can intall it on production?.  I have always installed modules provided to me as a zip -- like this one.  But because I changed their code and need to upload the new properly functioning module to production, I dont know how to do that...any ideas on this?

Thanks once again!