For anyone out there wanting to get a build process going for their latest project (or maybe even an older one), PHPMaster.com has the first part of a series about doing continuous integration with Jenkins posted with some good tips for you to get started.

What Jenkins does is not difficult to understand once you know why it does that. In this 2-part series I’ll present a big-picture overview of the sort of programming problems CI can solve, show how it can be achieved with the help of specialized software and explain how Jenkins can be minimally used to periodically trigger testing and building of PHP (web)applications, keeping a record of where integration succeeded or failed and maintaining an “output” folder up-to-date with the latest files that the application requires, ready to be uploaded to the server.

He uses a story to illustrate the usefulness of a Jenkins CI server, telling about different people working on different parts of an application and the differing decisions they all make about the code. He talks about how, with the help of a CI server, they could have avoided "integration hell" when they tried to bring their work back together and how things like version control, unit testing and automated builds could help.

There's brief instructions at the end to be sure you have two things set up before continuing on with the rest of the series - git for version control and ant for the build process.