Lorna Mitchell has a new post to her blog providing what she calls an idiot-proof guide to deployment with Phing, the popular PHP-based deployment tool based on Apache's Ant.

When I launched my own product recently (BiteStats, a thing to automatically email you a summary of your analytics stats every month), I knew that I would need a really robust way of deploying code. I've been doing a few different things for a few years, and I've often implemented these tools with or for other organisations, but I don't have much code in production in my own right, weirdly. I decided Phing was the way to go, got it installed, and worked out what to do next.

Her guide starts with a simple build.xml and builds it out with several tasks and targets including her main "deploy" target that grabs the next tag from her mercurial repository, packages it up for deployment. She explains things step by step so you won't miss anything too, since there's a lot going on.