I'm not sure that I've phrased the question all that well. What I'm really looking for is a feature of CMSs where content changes are made on a restricted access 'staging/preview' site, before being published to the live external site.

The open source/free CMSs I've looked at so far (Textpattern, WordPress, Movable Type) don't seem to allow this, as far as I can see. Although they allow new content to be saved as draft/pending, viewable by users with appropriate privileges, this doesn't work with changes to existing content -- a post/page can't be live and also have a new version pending. (Do correct me if I'm wrong).

I realise it should be possible to do this by making all changes on a staging site, and then replicating the contents of that database to a separate live site manually, but am looking for something a little more elegant.

Edit: Just to clarify, both

• systems which involve synchronising a live database with a staging database
• systems which offer live/staging views of a single database

would be of interest. Am sure I have seen both approaches in commercial/proprietary CMSs.