Kevin Schroeder has come back around and has posted a new tutorial to his blog showing how to connect PDT to the Zend Developer Cloud (the "PHP Development Tools" extension for the Eclipse IDE).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of blog posts on how to connect to the Zend Developer cloud with various IDEs. Except one that I missed... PDT. The deployment plugin is already installed in PDT 3 and so you already will have the ability to push to the DevCloud instance.

The process is pretty simple thanks to that plugin - just create the project (or use an existing one), set up a new target for deployment then launch and deploy the PHP application directly. You can find out more about the "PHP Development Tools" on its Eclipse project site.

Andrew Johnstone has a new post to his blog with a look at using Vagrant for continuous deployment of a PHP-based application.

Vagrant is simply a wrapper around Virtualbox headless that allows for provisioning virtual machines with support for puppet, chef-solo, chef, and bash. This allows you to automate the deployment and sandboxing of development sites. Additional base box images can be found at vagrantbox.es.

He walks you through the full process of setting up a first deployment - getting Vagrant installed, updating the config for a squeeze64.box image, configuring a virtualhost on the Apache web server and setting up a "preinstall" script to configure things like MySQL and install a long list of packages (via apt-get).

A few days ago Kevin Schroeder showed how to connect the Zend cloud services with the Zend Studio IDE. In this new post he shows how to connect another popular IDE - PHPStorm.

Just because you want to use the Zend Developer Cloud at phpcloud.com doesn't mean that you necessarily use Zend Studio. While I may wonder why you don't use Zend Studio ( :-) ) I know there are a lot of other good IDE's on the market and an IDE like PHPStorm might suit how you do your development.

He walks you through the whole process, complete with screenshots - creating the project on phpcloud, cloning your git repo there, configure PHPStorm for deployment (via SFTP) and set up a little path mapping.

As mentioned in this post to The Register, Zend, a large player in the PHP market, has announced their own cloud-based platform for deploying PHP-based applications - phpcloud.com.

Zend has announced a cloud for building and deploying PHP apps on other clouds - but without the management hassle. The PHP specialist has announced phpcloud.com, which it said was a technology platform and a partner ecosystem based on the company's Zend Framework and Server. Details are vague, but the technology platform consists of Zend App Fabric and Zend Developer Cloud. The App Fabric uses the Zend Framework - a library of loosely coupled PHP components - with Zend's PHP stack and management and diagnostics tools.

The platform comes with features for caching, job queuing, high availability and code traces (among others). It plays especially nice with Zend's Studio development tool. The site, phpcloud.com has full details on what the platform offers and how you can get started with it quickly and easily with a free developer account.

As mentioned on the Web Species blog in this recent post, they've developed a "Windows Azure done right" platform (Azure++, name pending) that makes deploying to an Azure platform a much simpler process, pulling from something like a remote code repository (maybe github) and deploying in less than five seconds.

Azure is just impossible to use for PHP today. This is a fact. Doesn't matter which way you look at it, it just su.. isn't particularly good. The amount of steps you need to make, the knowledge you need to have and the fact that you can only deploy from Windows host are some of the things which make it a very painful experience. I had enough of this pain.

The service helps you make quick and easy Azure deployments. Features include multiple datacenter support, your choice of PHP versions (5.2 or 5.3) and the ability to deploy in "production" or "development" environments. You can find out more about the service here.

The ServerGrove blog, a hosting provider whose services include shared hosting, has posted a guide to help you deploy to shared hosting with Capifony, a Symfony-based tool for use with Capistrano.

This article is meant to help you configure and deploy your projects developed with Symfony2 into a Shared Hosting environment, so if you need to deploy using capifony on a VPS, please read this article.

You'll need ssh access to the server to get things set up for the deployment as well as a local environment where you can install Ruby and Ruby Gems (their platform for the example is OSX). They help you get those installed and generate a key for use with the deployment. Once this key is copied over to the remote system, you can then set up the config to use the password-less connection and to deploy from either a local repository or a remote location (like github).

In this recent post to Theme.fm they have a guide to deploying your WordPress site (or really any sort of PHP-driven site) with Capistrano. There's some WordPress specific bits in there, but it's a good overall guide to deployment with this handy tool.

I'm not a Capistrano expert (yet) and in this post I'll try to give you an overview how to set it up and how to deploy WordPress applications (websites) in seconds. We'll work with only one server today but the principles in deploying to two or more are pretty much the same.

He starts by introducing Capistrano and talking about some of the major benefits it can bring to you and your project (most importantly - simple deployments). The tutorial helps you install Capistrano and get it set up to work with your Github repository to pull the source. The WordPress specific bit has to do with configuration files and suggests an "if" check to see if there's local config first. Also included are the updates you'll need to make to the Capistrano config file and the commands to push the latest as well as rollback to your previous version.

In a new post today Kevin Schroeder points out a new feature in the Zend Server project (version 5.5, beta) that helps make deployment simple for your site. He also includes a "getting started" guide to show it in action.

We have announced that we are making the beta for our new deployment feature in Zend Server 5.5 beta, available for download. It's not feature complete (there are some new features being worked on), but it provides the functionality needed for the 90% of us who do not have the need to have crazy complex deployment scenarios.

A short video is also included in the post to show how it's all set up in the Zend Server interface. His guide, using the "zdpack" tool, shows how to package up a basic Zend Framework project, create the deployment skeleton (including handy hooks like "stage/unstage", "activate/deactivate" where you can put Zend Framework-based PHP code), modify the deployment file to your needs and "zdpack" the result into a single packaged zip file. There's a forum for support and some sample applications if you'd like to try it out with less hassle.

On the Knp Labs site there's a recent post showing you how to use Capifony (a tool designed for use with Symfony projects) to deploy your Symfony-based applications in a few easy steps.

Deploying should be an active part of your development process, but not something that gives you a headache. If deploying your entire application takes more than one command or doesn't put a smile on your face, you should keep reading. NOTE: This post will specifically cover how to deploy your Symfony2 application, but the library used here - capifony - is just as useful for deploying a symfony 1.x application.

He walks you through the simple five step process of installing and configuring the capifony tool to pull from a remote git repository, set up some shared directories and update the vendor libraries on deployment. A few more changes for the initial deployment and you'll be ready to call "cap deploy" any time you'd like to push the latest version of your application. He also points out that with version 2.0.9 and above of capifony, Doctrine database migrations are also supported. For more information on capifony, see the project's website.

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.