The Big Makeover: Rejuvenating Legacy Applications

Legacy PHP applications range from fairly modern OOP codebases, that have just been neglected for a couple of years, to ancient collections of procedural PHP files with embedded HTML.

Often, a gradual modernisation is the only way to go: you want to maintain flexibility, keep the current production team onboard and actively involved, or are forced to continue using other existing legacy services that you are not able to update as well.
The challenges this approach presents can be daunting: Dealing with orphaned third-party libraries, incompatibilities with modern PHP versions in the code or dependencies, completely absent tests or automation, or bridging old and new security systems to work seamlessly as one (and secure...). To just name a few.

In this workshop, we will take a legacy codebase and refactor it step by step, dealing with typical obstacles you will encounter in real live projects. Along the way, we learn some key principles how a modern framework works at the core!