Best way to migrate content and various other changes from development to production 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, 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.
The most user friendly way to do the content migration you are talking about is by using the Backup and Migrate module.

You'll want to upload and enable the module on both development and production instances. The project page links to this tutorial series for a more detailed explanation. I also saw a helper module that backs up your files directory too. 

Features does in fact allow you to quickly import a "feature" to a website that you may have developed on your development environment and want to move to production. 

Ideally though, you'd want to use features to develop locally and then push to dev/staging server. The final push you'd want to just replicate the database from dev/staging to lessen the chance of configuration errors.

You could also use Drush if you want to do more advanced operations. You can write your own Drush commands and with aliases you can have this down to one command in a terminal if you'de want to. You can rsync files, sqlsync the databases, and use features commands to sync configuration options. Drupalize.me has a nice series on some of this stuff.

I highly recommend Drush, if you are getting more into Drupal, and also recommend checking out Drupal 8's CMI initiative for what lies ahead: https://groups.drupal.org/build-systems-change-management/cmi   

P.S. I would have posted more links but don't have the reputation yet to do so. So, just Google the missing pieces.