We manage the deployments of our Django application, in multiple environments (production/staging/experimental/development) using Buildout. It probably is quite difficult to learn at first, but very rewarding once you get the hang of it.
Deployment is all about being confident. And the confidence that Buildout has given us, is uncomparable to anything else.
A cool way to produce various settings/configurations, is using the Buildout recipe collective.recipe.genshi. This enables us to create settings based on templates, using buildout configuration parameters. Very flexible solution!