This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.

Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.

Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.