Tags, betas and release candidates

I'm at the stage building my publishing server software where having a more defined plan makes sense. I've started using git tags and semantic versioning to plan out the next few releases. Each release happens in stages so you have times where you only have part of the feature set written but you still want a release to test, with uncompleted features behind feature gates. These are beta releases (e.g. 1.1.0-beta.1, 1.1.0-beta.2). Then when you have all the pieces ready you try to put it all together in a release candidate (e.g. 1.1.0-rc.1). Eventually when it's all working you drop the extra qualifiers and you are left with just the version number. The core of the software is very solid, it basically never changes now, or if it does it's small tweaks. I haven't had to re-record the test fixtures in months. There are several layers that insulate the core business logic, both above it and below. It makes it much easier to change things in the frontend display, and in the backend…