Separate branches and environments for editing and production

[lukehler]

I'm floating an idea and I'm unsure if it's the right fit or if I'm overthinking it.

• I have a static site generated by a build script (Metalsmith in this case, just because the frontmatter/markdown format works well and it's easy).
• I want a production site deployed using the main branch without access to Decap (on Netlify, configured to return a 404 for anything at /admin): www.example.com.
• I want an editing site deployed on Github Pages built from an edit branch: edit.example.com.
• Editors would then access and make edits on edit using Decap.
• I would need editors to have access to merge from edit to main to deploy changes to production.
• This is for a (mostly) non-technical crowd and I really want "Deploy" (or "Go Live" or whatever) to be a simple button in the admin interface to squash commits and merge changes from edit into main.
• This is all for an organization without any real technical resources or financial support and a high likelihood of turnover. This makes free, low maintenance hosting (and fewer builds on Netlify) a priority.
• That same thought also makes me lean strongly towards having a distinct, non-volatile production environment (to make sure that production is stable whatever happens on the administrative and editorial side).

Has anyone done anything like this? The Editorial Workflow option sounds like it's made to handle this situation in a single environment but I'm not quite sold on it. From the description, I can easily imagine some confusion. Any "gotchas" to be aware of (beyond needing someone technical to resolve any potential catastrophic mistakes on edit)?