What's the best way to deploy a PHP application?

So you’ve put a whole bunch of work into a PHP web application and its time to deploy it. You can either FTP the whole thing to your webserver or you can SSH in and do an SVN or GIT export from your code repository. Both those solutions require you to touch your server and are pretty tedious.

I’ve heard of Capistrano (in fact, that’s what Fluther uses), but it’s written in Ruby, not PHP, which means you need to have Ruby and RubyGems installed on your server. Capistrano can also be rather difficult to use from what I hear.

How do you deploy your PHP applications? Are there tools available that will deploy in a PHP-native way? Are there frameworks or tools that interface with platforms like CakePHP, Symfony, or Zend?