Chris Hartjes has posted a "short guide" to deployment using phing, a PHP-based compilation and deployment tool.

While Capistrano is certainly up to the task of deploying my own personal projects, I had nothing but problems getting people OTHER than myself to get it up and running. You wouldn't think that getting Ruby and then assorted gems installed on a non-Windows machine would be that hard. Apparently it is. So what was my alternate solution? Create something that can be run on the server where the code is going to be deployed.

He creates a process similar to the Capistrano methods that uses a symlink to switch from an older version of the code to a newer one. He shares the configuration files he used to check out the latest source - all XML based.