Tagged: Architecture

When a client asks me to look at their Laravel application, I don't start by reading code. I run a specific sequence of checks that tells me more in 30 minutes than reading source files for a full day would. This isn't a full audit. It's triage. After working with Laravel for over a decade, I've found that a handful of structural checks reveal 80% of the problems. The patterns are surprisingly consistent. Here's the exact process I follow.

If you've run a WooCommerce store long enough, you've felt the slowdown. Pages take longer to load. The admin panel becomes sluggish. Checkout starts timing out during traffic spikes. You throw caching at it, upgrade your hosting, install optimization plugins. It helps for a while. Then it doesn't. I've been building with PHP and Laravel for over ten years, and I've migrated production WooCommerce stores to custom Laravel applications. Not as a theoretical exercise, but because the stores hit a wall that no amount of WordPress optimization could fix. Here's what that process actually looks like, including the parts the generic migration guides conveniently skip.

In late 2023, I was working on a large Laravel project and hit a point where the app/ directory had become a mess. Models, controllers, services, policies, listeners, jobs, notifications, all thrown into flat directories with no logical grouping. Everything related to billing lived next to everything related to user management. Finding anything required memorizing file names instead of following a structure. I knew the answer was modular architecture. Break the application into self-contained modules where each module owns its models, controllers, migrations, routes, views, and everything else related to that feature. I'd seen this pattern work in other frameworks and it made perfect sense for Laravel. So I looked at what was available. I tried several packages. None of them clicked. I started building my own solution inside that project. As it grew and I wanted the same structure in my other projects, I extracted it into an open-source package: mozex/laravel-modules.