Thinking about the changelog problem, I had the following idea:
On the website there would be a place maybe called "myDevelopment" or something. Here you would automatically find a list of all your recent commits. Seperated by release version. By default every new commit creates a new entry here. But you can manage the entries. - Edit the message and component of each entry - Mark an entry as trivial. These changes don't get into the changelog at all. - Split an entry, if a single commit contains 2 changes. You can fix up the messages afterwards. - Merge 2 or more entries into one new. On release the whole stuff will be gathered together.
Additional features: - Mark an entry as active workitem. Folling commits will automatically go in there. - Show recent activity on the frontpage. - Add planned activities, private notes, TODOs, FIXMEs, status, bugzilla links, etc