This is a collection of a few of the projects I’ve undertaken with PHP.
Adding multilingual support and modernising a legacy application
A client had a complex system which had been built over a number of years with no specific arcitectural design, it was running on PHP 5.2, at the time PHP 5.6 was the industry standard (7.0 was still freshly released) and upgrading the PHP version was not in budget, so the usual tools wouldn’t be an option.
Keen to avoid reinventing the wheel I decided that the best approach would be to make use of open source components. After a little research, I found a version of the Symfony Translation component which was still supported, and would work with PHP 5.2. So this was the component used.
The application had not been built with Object Orientation in mind, and routing had previously been handled with if/elseif statements spanning many files, across thousands of lines. While refactoring all of this logic would have been too much to fit within the project timescales, I was able to refactor the portions that I had to modify to use a routing package, and implement the functionality that I was adding using classes.
While this didn’t modernise the application overnight, it did put in place foundations which could be built on as other functionality was added or modified, allowing the application to improve over time, getting closer to something that would be easy to maintain.
Migrating from PHP 5.4 to 7.2 and adopting Docker and Kubernetes
Our team maintained an application which had run on PHP 5.4 for a number of years, and it was time to bring that into our new Kubernetes based architecture.