PHP Build system [closed]
I've used Capistrano with PHP (even though it's more of a Rails-y thing as it's written in Ruby).
It's been really straightforward to use, but that said I haven't had to scale much with it. We do deploy to various different staging/production servers though, and the multi-stage extension has been useful in those scenarios.
However like most things Ruby, there's a lot of hooks and "magic" which can get confusing if you're new to Capistrano and trying to do something tricky with it.
As for how it compares to other deployment tools, I can't comment. I know we used to use Phing, but I'm uncertain why we switched to Capistrano.
If you like Capistrano, but wished it was a bit more PHP'ish, check out Fredistrano.
I wrote an automated build (SVN export, Zend Guard encoding, etc) and deployment system using Phing once and found quite the pain to use. Whenever I had to write a special task I felt I had to jump through way to many hoops just to get it to work.
So, these days I just write simple bash scripts that does building with SVN checkout, encoding, creating a tag in SVN and deployment through rsync. It may be low-tech, and Phing may have some superior features, but atleast it doesn't get in my way.
Theres a new build tool, called Bldr. It uses Yaml for config, instead of xml like most of the build systems out there, and its highly extensible.