If you've ever wanted to put together automated builds for your project but didn't want to have to worry about all the setup and systems involved, Travis-CI might fit your needs. To help get you started NetTuts.com has posted this introduction to the (free) service and its features.

Travis CI makes working in a team for a software project easier with automated builds. These builds are triggered automatically when each developer checks in their code to the repository. In this article, we will go through how we can integrate Travis CI easily with our project, which is hosted on Github. With automation, notification and testing in place, we can focus on our coding and creating, while Travis CI does the hard work of continuous integration!

They focus on its use in a Node-based project, but Travis-CI is language agnostic, so the ideas still apply to PHP-based apps too. They introduce you to the Travis interface and show you how to hook it into your Github account. They also point out another handy feature of Travis - executing on pull requests to see if the results would break anything if merged. Plenty of screenshots are included in the post showing you different states of passing and failing builds. They also include a bit about showing the build status image in your project's README Markdown file.