How to do deployment for php application

Question

I am currently developing a php-application for a charity organization and I am now in the stage of defining the deployment practices.

Our application is using both Zend

Answer 1

Either way, I would manage your builds with phing or something similar. Let it run your tests, generate docs, build and publish your package/tarball.

As for distribution, you could run your own PEAR server. Rationale here is you said you want users to pull updates, you have both Windows and Linux users, and you want to handle dependencies for them. PEAR should be able to handle all that with one command.

That said, I would go with the simplest thing that works and suits your users. That could just be a tarball available via HTTP and a small PHP upgrade script (or a phing target.)

Definitely provide a simple way to rollback to a previous version. With code/configuration you can just keep a copy. With DB, use migrations (which it sounds like you're doing already.)