Ruby on Rails Dev/Test/Deploy Process

The person who developed and maintained 3 websites for non-profit organizations on a Linode server passed away unexpectedly leaving no documentation on how to maintain the websites. On a volunteer basis, I spent some time learning Ruby on Rails and have been maintaining the websites for several months. I have made small changes to the websites but don't know enough about the development, testing, and deployment process to make significant changes. We need a Ruby on Rails (ROR) expert to show us best practices for maintaining ROR websites, including how to make changes in a development environment, test the changes, and deploy them to the production environment. These websites are low volume and some downtime would be acceptable. We need to document the process. Perhaps someone could point us to existing documentation that we could tailor. I have looked at Linode documentation but haven't found anything specific enough. Would the Linode Community Forum be a good place to find someone who could help? Our linode has Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Rails 2.3.5, Ruby 1.8.7, MySql 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.3, "Powered by Phusion Passenger, modrails / modrack for Apache".