Modernise the Codebase

[JonPurvis]

Overview

Firstly, thanks to @jgrossi for inviting me to be a maintainer on this project! I think the first port of call is to update the tech stack to a more modern stack and give the site a bit of a facelift, which is what this PR does.

Stack & dependencies

• PHP 7.4 → 8.5
• Laravel 7 → 12
• Bootstrap removed; UI rebuilt with Flux UI and Tailwind CSS
• Livewire v4 (with wire:navigate for SPA-style navigation)
• Frontend: Vite 7 with laravel-vite-plugin v2; Tailwind v4. Axios and Stimulus removed (Livewire handles requests and interactivity).
• Faker: abandoned fzaninotto/faker replaced with FakerPHP
• Testing: Pest PHP with in-memory SQLite; tests run in parallel

UI/UX

• All main views converted to Flux components (cards, buttons, forms, callouts, badges, etc.)
• Profile/Settings redesigned: sectioned layout (title + description left, form right), separate forms per section, dividers
• Trade area: country filter is Livewire (no full page reload); trader count restored; trade status on My Herd shown as badges (green “X in trade area” / grey “0 in trade area”)
• Homepage (logged out): hero background grey; Register primary, Login outline
• Ranking: country column plain text; filter via dropdown only
• Species/My Herd: search without Reset/Clear buttons; consistent empty states
• Feedback: success and status messages use Flux callouts (icon + heading) across the app
• wire:navigate loading bar styled to match theme (purple)

Tooling & CI

• GitHub Actions on pull requests: Pint, Larastan, Pest (in that order)
• Pint and Larastan in use for style and static analysis; PHPStan passes (incl. Livewire computed properties and pivot type hints via ElephpantUserPivot)

Other

• New trade request email includes sender’s Mastodon link when set
• Countries: pragmarx/countries replaced with Sushi (JSON-backed model) where applicable
• PHP 8.5: database config uses Pdo\Mysql::ATTR_SSL_CA when available (avoids deprecated PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_CA)
• Accent colour changed from blue to purple to closer match The PHP Foundation
• Works on both light and dark mode
• Will close Upgrade to Laravel 12 #252
• Will close New integration #83
• Will close Laravel + PHP update #202
• Will close Implementation Tests #63

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Screenshots

[JonPurvis]

@jgrossi @teiling88 What do you guys think?

[teiling88]

Quick update for everyone: Junior and I are working on the hand-over! My first priority is a full server migration to a more modern environment.

Regarding this PR: it’s a massive addition, and while I’d love to see it integrated, we need to fix the base first (PHP versions, infra) before we can move on. Additionally, I’m not a Laravel expert and currently don't have the capacity to do a deep dive into an AI PR of this scale.

[JonPurvis]

@teiling88 Happy to leave this open for now. Have specifics such as PHP version in the new environment been decided yet?

[teiling88]

@JonPurvis It’s configurable, so our plan is to start with PHP 7.4 to ensure a smooth migration, and then immediately move forward to PHP 8.4/8.5.