I am currently thinking of a way to nicely structure my web project with mercurial. I was thinking of having two branches default (for development & testing) and release (the finished code which gets published). I would develop and test on the default branch until I have a stable application running. Then I would merge into the release branch. When I push the code to my central repository (on the server where my web application lives) I would want the code to be automatically published. 

Is this the right way to go and if yes can this automatic publishing of the release branch be achieved with hooks?