On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted that aims to help you deploy your PHP application with Rocketeer, a PHP-based deployment tool with lots of built in functionality for more complex deployments.

There used to be a time when PHP developers had to use deployment tools that were aimed at general web applications. [...] But nowadays, we're blessed with a few deployment tools written in our language that enable deeper integration. One of these tools is Rocketeer, a tool that takes inspiration from Capistrano and the Laravel framework.

Rocketeer is a modern tool that brings a great approach for your deployment needs. That is to run tasks and manage your application across different environments and servers.

They start with a brief introduction to the Rocketeer tool (basically a SSH driven command execution engine) and show you how to get it installed on your system. They then help you initialize the setup directory (.rocketeer) and describe each of the pieces and how the deployment happens. They show you how to configure events and tasks in the system to perform during execution. They also show the definition of "strategies" to execution events/tasks in groups, work with plugins and, finally, running an example deployment.