I am more than excited to be able to announce this upgrade today. After many months of hard work, the entire site has been updated to use the Laravel Framework. Wisletics was initially built using the popular CodeIgniter Framework and, while it served it's purpose, the lack of active development within CodeIgniter led us to find another solution. Laravel has proven more than capable, and enables us to speed up development, and add new features quicker. In fact, while upgrading to Laravel, many new features previously difficult or impossible to implement have been added. Future blog posts will highlight many of these enhancements.

Along with an upgrade of the framework, hosting has switched from shared hosting on GoDaddy, to a VPS with Digital Ocean. This switch allows for two main improvements. First, Wisletics will be able to quickly and easily scale our resources as the site grows. As traffic increases and more content is added, a new server with more processing power, RAM, and storage space can be up and running within minutes. Second, the server is now 100% customizable. No longer are we limited by what the hosting provider chooses to install on its shared servers. One place this will immediately benefit users is with the search engine on the website. Full server control has allowed us to install and use the popular ElasticSearch application. ElasticSearch makes creating a custom search engine for a website quick and easy. Newly created resources are automatically indexed, and available to search almost instantly.

While this upgrade represents a huge step forward for Wisletics I realize it will not seem as exciting to our everyday user, as this post outlines more of the technical side of things. Rest assured, these improvements will allow our developers to deliver more features to you, and deliver them quickly. Keep an eye out for another post in the near future, because I am excited to be able to share these amazing new features with you!