best way to deploy sites with Subversion (SVN)?

[eluser]nanda[/eluser]
Hi, I'm developing an custom CMS that will need to be deployed for a couple of different projects. I want to be able to work on the core code and push the changes out to the installations. of course the installations will have some custom theming etc., so I don't want to affect that either.

I figure I could do this with subversion but have never used it before. I've done a lot of searching/googling but haven't found any clear instructions on how to do this, does anyone have any tips or advice?

I was planning on using beanstalkapp.com as it seems a simple way to get into svn.