On his blog Nabeel Shahzad goes through creating a deployment using Phing, replacing nasty shell scripts; extracting from Subversion, variable replacements and file manipulation, and creating multiple deployment types in one build file.

It is very easy to integrate other tools and components into the Zend Framework. I have already shown, how to integrate Smarty as a template engine and the eZ Components to expand the selection of useful components to build your own framework based on the Zend Framework.

Since the Zend Framework is currently (Preview Version 0.1.3) lacking an ORM-Layer (Object Relational Mapping), I want to show you how to integrate Propel. Propel allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and querying data. So Propel can easily take over the model part in a MVC system.