After a few years of keeping the Legacy LMS healthy on an end-of-life stack, I wrote up a plan to modernize it from the ground up: the stack, the hosting model, the delivery pipeline, and the migration path for every client. The plan was the point. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I started building it on my own time to find out whether it holds up.
The result is a full rebuild of a multi-tenant learning platform: Laravel 11 on PHP 8.3 instead of PHP 5.6 and Phalcon, an Angular 19+ Nx monorepo instead of AngularJS 1.7, and an isolated server for every client instead of shared ones.
Written up as a modernization plan for a legacy LMS, then built independently as a personal project to prove the plan.
Every layer of the stack gets a fresh start:
The biggest architectural change is isolation. In the Legacy LMS, every client shares the same servers and the separation happens in code. In the new platform, Terraform provisions a separate EC2 instance for each client, and cloud-init bootstraps it from scratch with nobody logging in to set it up. Data isolation rolls out in phases, so the move can happen gradually instead of in one terrifying weekend.
Getting clients there is its own project, so I built custom tooling that pulls data from the Legacy LMS, transforms it for the new schema and loads it into the new platform.
Accounts move through clear states (pending, active, deactivated), gated by email activation. That’s a direct lesson from the Legacy LMS, where I once found a deactivated user could reactivate themselves through a password reset. In the new platform, the account lifecycle is designed in from the start instead of patched on later.
Each user belongs to exactly one category, and can join any number of groups for course assignment.
GitLab CI tests, builds and deploys every change, so the new platform starts life with the delivery habits the old one had to have bolted on later.
I use Claude to dig through how the legacy platform actually behaves and to scaffold new work, which keeps a one-person rebuild moving at a steady clip. The architecture and the plan are mine; the AI helps me get there faster.
Maintaining the Legacy LMS taught me where it hurts. The plan, and the rebuild behind it, is my chance to design those pain points out instead of working around them.