One major restriction of vs.php, that has me looking elsewhere regularly, is its limited deployment or build options.

While it's great to be able to deploy files to the server, by copying, ftp-ing, ssl-ing, etc. there are times when more complicated things need to be done.

In my case, I have several dozen customer projects that all contain a home-made framework. In order to avoid losing control on the framework, I have a framework project at the same directory level of all my customer projects, and I have it copied to the customer directory before I debug/run the customer project. My problem is that I would like to execute this script either manually from vs.php or automatically from a build-and-debug option.

The script is a windows batch file.

Here's how I could see a "script" deploy option work:
- when "script" is selected in the combobox of the project property pages, show a textbox input for the script (batch file) to execute
- the script should be looked for in the project directory by default (to prevent hardcoding full paths in the project)
- the current directory (chdir) should be set to the project directory by default (to prevent hardcoding full paths in the script)
- then, it should be executed

One possibility could be to create a new project or context menu option besides "Deploy" and call it "Build". Then, be allowed to select a script for the Build process, that would be configurable in the project pages.

Thanks

md.