branching much easier, tagging much harder?

I'm considering moving from CVS to subversion, but I'm having trouble
making subversion work with my company's development process.

My company builds a lot of small-to-medium web sites, mostly in PHP.

In CVS, a developer can mark a file in his sandbox as a "release
candidate" by tagging it "RC": cvs tag -F RC index.php

This is a pretty simple command, and it's really easy to execute with
tortoise as well, simply right-mouse on the file, select "tag" and enter
"RC" in the dialog box.

When we're ready to do a release, we update our staging sandbox
(everything tagged "RC"), test, tag it as "release 1.1", and push it to
production.

Here are my problems:

1) The syntax to perform the equivalent in subversion is too complex.
I'm under the impression that I need figure out the version numbers
involved, merge, and then commit. I could write a script that does
this, but that still doesn't help the people that use tortoise.

2) It introduces the possibility for error. Before we had version
control, our developers used to drag and drop files from their work
areas into the staging docroot. Often, they'd goof and drag an
"index.php" into the wrong folder. Using tags to move files to staging
solved this problem, but with subversion you have to enter the path name
twice re-introducing the possability of promoting a file into the wrong
place.

The former is the largest problem for me. I need an easy way to say
"this version of the file that's in my sandbox should be promoted to
release candidate status".

I'm a total subversion novice, so I'm hoping that there is a simple way
to use subversion that doesn't involve radically changing the
development process at my company. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

   -- Mike

P.S. To complete the thought that I started in my subject line, I
really like subversion's branching; it's much simpler conceptually than
CVS's model.

-- 
Michael Muller
Senior Application Developer, Inter@ctivate, Inc.
2503 Walnut Street, Suite 301 Boulder, CO 80302
http://www.interactivate.com
phone: 303-442-1740
fax:   303-442-1750
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