I've been reading about Capistrano, Pake, and Phing and I'm just not finding what I need. It seems like these deployment packages all assume that you have full access to your deployment server, that is SSH access.
What I need is a good deployment package that works with SVN and is able to deploy via FTP or via SSH. Anything out there able to do this?
Try weex. It's an ftp client to upload web pages.
I think in your case, I'd package my release and transfer that. The most simple approach is creating a tag (from trunk), then run an SVN export (locally) and then upload the remainder. You can wrap that in a script:
#!/bin/bash
svn cp http://server/trunk http://server/tag/$1
svn export http://server/tag/$1 ./local
weex yourprofile
(Run with: ./tagging.sh)
... also, create a profile for weex (yourprofile), before you run that.
The other tools you mentioned require a lot, but they also work really, really well. I always use capistrano when I deploy straight from SVN. In some cases I also use PEAR to deploy my websites and libraries.
Phing and Capistrano should be able to deploy to a server via SSH (capistrano) or FTP (phing). I do know that both work with svn but they both work a little differently. From my experience with Capistrano, it connects to the server via ssh and runs the checkout/export. Phing seems a lot like a scripting language where you tell it what to do and when using an XML format.