I'm about to make a bunch of updates and changes to content types, views, themes and actually adding content on my development server. I was wondering if there was an easier way to migrate things from development to production beyond doing the following:

* putting the production server in maintenance mode.
* copying over everything (development -> production) from site root (excluding sites/default/settings.php)
* exporting the development database and importing it on the production server
* crossing fingers and hoping that nothing crashes for unforeseen reasons.

I've seen that there's already some posts on workflows that involve using the [features module](https://drupal.org/project/features), but does it actually export content or settings changes to things like blocks and views? I was wondering if there was a module or a tutorial that I wasn't able to find on google that gave some good advice on this.