The Phing Project lead developer
Archive_Tar & VersionControl_SVN maintainer

PHing Is Not GNU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Features include running PHPUnit and SimpleTest unit tests (including test result and coverage reports), file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS/SVN operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.

If you find yourself writing custom scripts to handle the packaging, deploying, or testing of your applications, then we suggest looking at the Phing framework. Phing comes packaged with numerous out-of-the-box operation modules (tasks), and an easy-to-use OO model for adding your own custom tasks.