A UK B2B compliance SaaS. CakePHP 2.x from 2016. 180 routes. The two engineers who wrote it had left two years before. CakePHP 2 hit end of life. Senior CakePHP devs were unfindable.
Migration CakePHP to Laravel migration · Yii to Laravel migration · UK
CakePHP + Yii to modern migration for the PHP estate the original team. left behind.
We move UK SaaS and enterprise apps off CakePHP 2 / 3 / 4 and Yii 1 / 2 onto Laravel 11 + Eloquent — or fully to Node + React + Mongo. Auth rebuilt, ORM ported, queues modernised, tests added.
5CakePHP / Yii migrations shipped
10×larger hiring pool after migration
8Kfixed 5-day migration audit
(Why founders + CTOs migrate now)
You don’t need to leave PHP. You need to leave the version of CakePHP / Yii that’s costing you growth.
CakePHP 2 / 3 and Yii 1 are past end-of-life. Yii 2 is in maintenance mode. Running unsupported PHP frameworks is a security and insurance question, and the senior hiring pool for them has shrunk to nothing.
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The founder this page is for180 routes · 2 estates · 17 pen-test issues
Bruno took over engineering on a CakePHP 2 codebase the original team left behind.
A junior tried to upgrade to CakePHP 4 and broke production for 3 days. Yii 1 modules in a sister product carried the same EOL story. A pen test flagged 17 issues across both estates. The board wanted a decision: modernise both or kill one.
Sixteen-week dual migration. CakePHP estate to Laravel 11. Yii estate to Node + React + Mongo. Both cut over with zero downtime. Hiring time dropped from quarters to weeks. This page is for the founder or CTO who has decided the migration is happening.
Our migration process
Four phases
No mystery box. Each phase is fixed-scope, fixed-price, and ends with a written deliverable you can show your board. You decide whether to continue at every phase boundary.
Phase 01
5-day migration audit
Two senior engineers read your CakePHP / Yii code, data, and infra. Output: a 20-30 page audit pack with risk matrix, target architecture, and a fixed quote. £8K fixed.
Phase 02
Plan + parallel build
We build the Laravel / MERN target in parallel. Your old system keeps running. Data dry-runs, rebuilt integrations, dual-write and shadow-read set up. No customer-facing change yet.
Phase 03
Cutover (planned window)
Often a weekend. We dual-run, shadow-read, then flip the canonical write path. Old system stays read-only for 60 days. Rollback rehearsed and reversible.
Phase 04
Stabilise + decommission
We monitor, fix what only production traffic surfaces, hand over to your team or our retainer, and decommission the old estate on a schedule you sign off.
Eight risks that sink migrations. How we close each one before cutover.
We don’t pretend migrations are safe. We make the risks legible and mitigated, in writing, before a single line of production code changes.
- 01
“The core is unsupported, so there are no security patches.”
Move to a supported framework on PHP 8.3 or Node 22. Insurance and procurement gates that were closing reopen. The EOL CVE risk goes away.
- 02
“Cake / Yii ActiveRecord has framework-specific conventions everywhere.”
Relations, behaviours, finders mapped to Eloquent or Prisma / Mongoose. Migration files generated. Tests added on the way through.
- 03
“Cake’s inflection routing is implicit and undocumented.”
Route map exported at audit, made explicit in Laravel. Yii routing is more configurable and ports more directly. Nothing is left to guess.
- 04
“Cake AuthComponent and Yii’s identity layer hold the whole login flow.”
Ported to Sanctum / Fortify or Clerk / NextAuth. Sessions bridged during cutover so logged-in users stay logged in.
- 05
“Cake views, helpers, and Yii widgets render the whole front end.”
Cake views ported to Blade, Yii widgets ported to React. Visual parity tested screen by screen before the flip.
- 06
“Cake Behaviors and Yii modules hide reusable business logic.”
Audited, then ported to Laravel service providers / macros or Express middleware. Callback chains that fire across models get traced and covered by tests.
- 07
“There’s no test suite to tell us if the migration broke anything.”
Pest or Jest + Playwright added as we port. We target 30-50% coverage by cutover, on the surfaces that matter most.
- 08
“We have multiple products on Cake / Yii and can’t move them all at once.”
Sequenced: smallest or highest-pain first, migrate, learn, repeat. Risk and cost both bounded. You never bet the business on one big flip.
The stack we migrate you to.
We default to Laravel or MERN + Python + AWS. We’re comfortable on GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Vercel, and Fly.io where your team has constraints or a relationship.
T1
Default target stack
Laravel / MERNLaravel 10 / 11PHP 8.3Node.js + ExpressReact + Next.jsEloquent / Prisma / MongooseSanctum / ClerkBlade + Alpine.js / ReactStripeHorizon + Redis / BullMQPest / Jest + PlaywrightResendMixpanel
T2
Migration-specific tooling
source export + refactorLaravel ShiftRectorCakePHP / Yii CLIphpMyAdmin / Sequel AceMySQL WorkbenchVisual parity testing
T3
Infra, observability, safety net
AWS-defaultAWSAWS RDSAWS DocumentDBAWS LambdaSQS / EventBridgeS3 + CloudFrontRedisTerraformDatadogSentryCloudflareForge / Vapor / Vercel
Case study · CakePHP 2 + Yii 1 to Laravel + MERN
Bruno’s dual migration,
Bruno’s dual migration,
two estates, in numbers
Brief: modernise both PHP estates or kill one. Sixteen-week dual migration. CakePHP product to Laravel 11. Yii product to Node + React + Mongo. Auth rebuilt, ORM ported, test suite added per product. Cutover sequenced product-by-product. Zero downtime per cutover.
The dual migration
16 wks
Two estates modernised
17
Pen-test issues closed
Hiring
Quartersweeks
Time to hire, after migration
10×
Deeper hiring pool
Cutover
0
Downtime per cutover
60 days
Old estate kept read-only
Two phases, then a retainer. Pricing in the email back.
Pick the shape that fits and Mohit will send your real number inside 24 hours.
5-day migration audit
Two senior engineers read your CakePHP / Yii estate, data, and integrations. Map the migration. Write the risk matrix. Quote the sprint.
- 20-30 page audit pack
- Risk matrix + target architecture
- Data migration + rollback plan
- £8,000 fixed, no build commitment
Laravel / MERN migration sprint
Parallel build, dry-run data migration, planned cutover, post-cutover stabilisation, decommission. 8-16 weeks by estate size.
- From £45K fixed scope
- Two senior engineers
- 30-day walk-away both ways
- IP assigns on every commit
Post-migration retainer
One day a week senior engineer for 3-6 months. New surface area, performance work, integrations. Your team gets unblocked.
- From £5K / month
- New surfaces + perf work
- Your team trained in parallel
- Cancel with notice, no lock-in
“Both products cut over with zero downtime. Hiring time dropped from quarters to weeks. We modernised both estates instead of killing one.”
— Bruno, VP Engineering, UK B2B compliance SaaSWhat CTOs actually ask on the audit call
Direct answers, no marketing varnish.
It depends on team and product. A PHP-fluent team with a product that’s mostly CRUD points to Laravel. A team that wants JavaScript end-to-end with a rich front end points to MERN. We’ll recommend at the audit, honestly. Most CakePHP to Laravel migration jobs stay PHP; some Yii estates with heavy interactivity move to Node + React.
Yes. They’re different frameworks with different conventions, and we have senior engineers on both. The migration tooling differs but the cutover discipline is the same: parallel build, dual-write, shadow-read, planned flip, rehearsed rollback.
Usually 10-20 weeks for a single estate. Multi-product work can be sequenced or parallelised. The 5-day audit gives you the real number based on route count, custom behaviour depth, and front-end complexity, not a guess.
Sometimes, yes. If your team is staying on PHP + CakePHP and the migration cost to Laravel doesn’t pay back, an in-place Cake 4 modernisation is the sensible call. We’ll be honest at the audit rather than sell you the bigger job.
The same engineering discipline applies. Symfony 2 / 3 to Symfony 6 or Laravel is common. Phalcon to Laravel or Node is common. Ask at the audit and we’ll tell you where it lands.
30-day walk-away both ways. The migration starts with a fixed £8K audit, not a 12-week SOW. You’re never more than a few weeks at risk. UK VAT registered, on Companies House, shipping since 2019.
Every migration runs with two senior engineers paired, not one. Every decision goes into an ADR the same day, and Mohit reviews every PR. If one engineer leaves, the other has full context the next morning. Two handovers in seven years, both inside 48 hours.
Yes, with 14 days’ notice. Because we build in parallel and keep the old estate live until cutover, pausing is safe. Spend pauses, engineers move, you resume with 14 days’ notice. No cancellation fee, no restart fee.
In context
Inside the work.
A look at the kind of cakephp yii to modern migration surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.
Two senior engineers. 5 days. One decision.
Send a 5-line brief: your current CakePHP / Yii estate (traffic, data size, integrations), why you want to migrate, and the deadline you’re working to. Mohit replies inside 24 hours with availability and the next 5-day audit slot.
What happens after the email lands
- < 24h
A personal reply.
Availability, and the next 5-day migration audit slot.
- Week 1
Audit begins.
Risk matrix, target architecture, data plan, fixed quote.
- Cutover
Zero downtime.
Dual-run, shadow-read, planned flip, rehearsed rollback.