[SalesForce] Deployment Error: Property ‘activateRSS’ not valid in version 28.0

The order of the elements in a single package.xml are irrelevant. The system intelligently reorders dependencies so that the elements are deployed in the correct order. Occassionally, the system doesn't get it right, though, in which case the order of the package.xml elements will not help you at all. For those situations, you must instead deploy multiple package.xml files and directories independently. Generally, the order within each package will not matter, but packages that refer to elements in other packages will need to be deployed after the elements they refer to.

One possible solution is to use Packages as a container for your code. This allows you to retrieve only the code in your package from an org which ignores all other metadata in the org such as managed package fields, standard Salesforce fields, and any customer created fields.

To test it out, go to Setup->Create->Packages in your source org. Create an unmanaged package and use the Add Components button to add all the metadata you want to bundle in your package. Then, retrieve all metadata from the package into a folder. You'll wind up with a folder containing all the metadata and a package.xml file formatted to allow deployment into a Package in your target orgs.

The key difference in the package.xml is the inclusion of the element which flips on the deploy to package functionality.

The one catch is the target org will need to have a package with the same name already created before the deployment but this is a one time manual step per target org.

I just wrote up the build.xml targets in a different answer you can reference here: https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/a/31437/4832

There are, however, some drawbacks. Some metadata types won't deploy this way. For example, ActionOverrides don't work this way as they can't be bundled in a package. As a workaround, you can create a normal bundle of metadata for use only in deploying the types you can't deploy as part of a package.