Crimewire blog platform migration

The inbound marketing team at The Control Group was managing five blogs, three of which used Laravel, the other two on WordPress. Tony Lea, a senior developer at The Control Group, had written an admin package for Laravel called Voyager. I worked with Tony adding features to the Laravel + Voyager managed blogs. Because of the two different platforms (WordPress & Laravel), this made adding features to all five blogs a development chore. I got tasked with moving the Crimewire blog off of WordPress, and onto Laravel + Voyager.

Laravel Migration & WordPress Schema

The Crimewire blog had over 600 posts, and my first step was to write a script that populated the new Laravel app database with the Wordpress posts. I wrote a script in PHP that pulled the data from the WordPress database and then filled a blog post model and then saved it to the Laravel database. This simple script would prove to be valuable months later to migrate the second and final WordPress blog.

Blog Posts & Categories

I built the blog features by making models for posts and categories. I also developed a feature that used data from the Google Analytics API to query popular posts by user behavior. I created all the views required such as the default homepage, categories, authors, blog posts, and pages.

Responsive & Fast

I added the Glide package to the app to manage the image sizes and request images to match the layout. I also wrote a script in JavaScript to lazy load images. These features resulted in smaller and fewer file requests and faster load time on mobile devices.

Conclusion

Upon launch, the blog scored a 97 on Google PageSpeed Insights. The inbound marketing team was thrilled with the results, and it was one of my favorite projects while employed at The Control Group.