Rescuing an ERP from a hostile developer, then rebuilding the storefront
www.suntile.comSun Tile has installed flooring across Central Texas since 1984, with more than 75,000 installations behind it. Every job, builder, installer, work order and invoice ran through a custom Laravel ERP — and that system, along with the infrastructure it lived on, was under the control of a developer the relationship had broken down with. That is an existential risk dressed up as a technical problem. The first job was getting the company's own software back under the company's own control.
When a single outside developer holds your source control, your servers, your DNS and your deploy keys, you do not have a vendor — you have a dependency you cannot survive. Sun Tile's ERP is the system of record for the whole operation: builders, communities, tract plans, jobs, work orders, invoices, installer payments and stock ordering. If it went dark, the company could not bill.
The relationship with that developer had deteriorated. So the problem was not primarily a code problem, it was a custody problem with a hard sequencing constraint: recover the code and the data, stand the system up somewhere the client actually owns, and do it without an outage in a business that invoices daily.
Underneath the custody issue sat real technical debt. The application runs on Laravel 5.3 and an AngularJS single-page front end — both long past end of life — with no continuous integration, no automated checks, and deploys that happened by hand on someone else's machine.
And separately, the public website was a WordPress and Divi build where every new service area meant another page hand-assembled in a visual editor.
Before any improvement work, the priority was getting the codebase, the database and the operational configuration into the client's own possession — so that whatever happened next, Sun Tile owned the thing their business depends on. Everything after this step was only possible because this step came first.
The ERP was moved onto infrastructure Sun Tile controls, with their own account, their own credentials and their own billing relationship. The system of record for a company that has been trading since 1984 now sits where its owners can see it, audit it, and hand it to anyone they choose.
The application had no automated pipeline at all — changes went out by hand. We added continuous integration and a release workflow, so a change is built and checked before it ships and a deploy is a repeatable process rather than an act of trust in one person's laptop.
A 51-table, 71-controller system that correctly models a decade of real operational nuance — tract-plan replication across communities, stock-order consolidation into supplier POs, an installer debt and payment ledger for 1099 subcontractors — is not a rewrite candidate. It is an asset. We improved it where it hurt and left the parts that work alone, so the team never had to relearn their own tools.
With the back office stable and owned, the public site was rebuilt off WordPress and Divi onto a typed Next.js build: 126 legacy items migrated, 15 city pages and 40 material pages generated from data modules, and every old WordPress URL pattern explicitly redirected so four decades of accumulated search equity survived the cutover.
The parts that were genuinely hard — and how they were solved.
The measurable outcome of the rescue is not a feature. It is that Sun Tile can now change vendors, including changing away from us, without asking permission from anyone. Any engagement that leaves a client unable to fire you has been structured badly.
The constraint that shaped the migration was that the business bills out of this application. A cutover window is not a technical preference when work orders and installer payments are moving through the system continuously — sequencing and rehearsal mattered more than speed.
Laravel 5.3 and AngularJS are both end of life, and the tempting move is a rewrite on something current. That would have meant reimplementing years of encoded operational knowledge — how a tract plan replicates into a new community, how installer debt nets against payments — for no gain the business would feel. Stabilise, own, automate; modernise only where it pays.
The materials catalogue, service-area list and blog live in TypeScript data modules totalling roughly 2,300 lines. Adding a city or a material is a typed object the compiler validates. No CMS to log into, no plugin surface to patch, no database to keep alive.
Every WordPress pattern is mapped — wp-admin, wp-content, xmlrpc, RSS feeds, and the category, tag and author archives — as permanent redirects. The full 126-item WordPress export stays in the repository as a migration audit trail rather than being deleted after cutover, so 'did that paragraph make it across?' is answered with a diff.
A running SEO log tracks position and impression drift page by page and explicitly separates genuine regressions from head-term dilution and ordinary SERP noise — which stops the team from 'fixing' pages that were never broken.