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The PHP or Yii application your business already runs on

You already own a working PHP or Yii application. We keep it secure and current, and we tell you honestly whether it is worth maintaining, modernising, migrating or leaving well alone.
The problem

The PHP application still earns its keep. The worry is what to do with it next.

Plenty of solid businesses run on PHP, and a good number of those run on Yii. The software was built years ago, it works, and it quietly does a job that would cost a small fortune to replace. Then the questions start. Is it still secure? Is it holding the business back? Is the one person who really understood it still around?

None of those are reasons to panic, and none of them are reasons to rebuild from scratch. They are reasons to have someone who knows the framework look at it properly and tell you where you actually stand.

The expensive instinct

Rip it out and start again. Sometimes that is the right call. Far more often it becomes a two-year project sold to replace software that a fortnight of focused work would have fixed, and it quietly throws away years of business logic that nobody ever wrote down.

The cheap instinct

Leave it completely alone. That holds up right until the PHP version underneath it drops out of support, a library stops receiving security patches, or the contractor who knew it moves on. A risk you had been living with comfortably becomes an urgent one overnight.

How we work

We look at what you have before we tell you what to do with it.

  1. 01

    Assess

    We read the code, the PHP and framework versions, the dependencies and the parts everyone is nervous about touching. You get a plain account of what state the application is in, what is genuinely risky and what only looks it.

  2. 02

    Advise

    Then the honest recommendation: keep it, modernise it, migrate it or replace it, with the reasoning and the cost attached. Not a conclusion that happens to suit whoever is billing you, and not a rewrite dressed up as inevitable.

  3. 03

    Look after

    Whichever path you pick, we keep the application patched, secure and shipping. The software we have built and run for Jaguar Land Rover since 2013 is a PHP application, and we are still extending it today.

What's included

What the work covers, in more detail.

  1. 01

    An assessment and a straight recommendation

    We start by reading what you have: the framework version, the PHP version, the dependency tree and the areas of the code that have accumulated fear over the years. You get an honest report on the application's health and a recommendation you can act on, whether that is a light touch or a bigger piece of work.

  2. 02

    Support and maintenance for live Yii and PHP applications

    The ongoing work that keeps a piece of business operations software dependable: PHP version updates, dependency and framework upgrades, bug fixes, performance work and new features as the business needs them. We work as your outsourced development team rather than a ticket queue you shout into.

  3. 03

    Security and dependency updates

    Yii has solid protections built in against cross-site scripting and request forgery, and sensible handling of passwords and credentials. Those only help while the framework and its libraries stay current. We keep the dependencies patched, close off the flaws that matter, and keep the application on a supported PHP version rather than one that quietly stopped receiving fixes.

  4. 04

    Migrating from Yii 1 to Yii 2, or off Yii entirely

    Migrating a large Yii 1 application is a real project: roughly four in every ten lines of code change to meet the Yii 2 format, and views, forms and ActiveRecord queries all have to be rewritten. We have built our own tooling to automate the repetitive parts, we deploy onto AWS with zero downtime, and we fold in the feature updates you have been waiting on so you get more than the same application with a newer engine.

    There is more on the detail of that work in our article on the challenges and opportunities of migrating from Yii 1 to Yii 2.

  5. 05

    Modernising without a full rewrite

    Often the right answer is somewhere between leaving it alone and starting over. We break stubborn pieces of a monolith out into serverless components on AWS Lambda, replace bespoke PHP widgets with modern web components, and refactor the areas that hurt, all while the application keeps running and earning.

“The app has been very well received and has been a great success. It is significantly faster and easier to use than its predecessor - allowing our surveyors to produce more detailed reports.”
Kevin Taplin, Director, Watts Group

PHP applications we have kept working for years

Where the work touches hosting, we bring our AWS practice with it. We are an AWS Select Tier Services Partner and we run a Well-Architected review on every engagement, which is a large part of why the bill and the risks are on the table early rather than in month four.

Read the Cloud Excellence Framework
Questions

The things owners ask us first.

  • Should we just rewrite it?

    Sometimes, yes. When an application is fighting the business on every change, a rewrite can be the cheaper option over a few years. But it is the expensive answer far more often than it is the right one, and we will tell you which case you are in rather than reaching for the biggest invoice.

  • Is Yii a dead end?

    No. Yii 2 is a mature PHP framework, and a working application built on it is an asset, not a liability. We will not pretend it is the fashionable choice, and we will not talk you into replacing it to suit us. If moving off Yii is genuinely the right move for the business, we will do it on your timetable.

  • Can you take on an application you did not build?

    Yes, and most of this work is exactly that. We take over codebases we have never seen, learn their conventions and get productive without breaking what already works. We did precisely that with Spacesuit Media's Yii 2 platform, auditing it first and then extending it safely.

  • Who will actually do the work, and will we be locked in?

    The two founders, with the trusted collaborators we bring in around them. There is no account manager between you and the people writing the code, and no junior learning on your application. It runs in your own AWS account, and you hold a copy of the code, the infrastructure and the deployment pipeline.

Related

A PHP application rarely needs just one thing.

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