Velg Training Membership & Events Platform Modernisation

Overview

Velg Training provides professional development, events, resources and membership for Australia's vocational education and training (VET) sector, with more than 34,000 members. Their website runs the whole business: memberships and renewals, webinars and conferences with ticketing, an online shop and checkout, invoicing with MYOB, email newsletters, a knowledge hub with thousands of resources, and the internal admin panel the Velg team use every day.

We took over the platform in early 2026. The codebase hadn't been upgraded in seven to eight years. We first replaced an over-complex AWS setup with simpler AWS hosting managed through Laravel Forge, with a load balancer in front of two servers. That cut the monthly AWS bill by 27% and made the site more stable. We then wrote a modernisation plan, recommended a full rebuild over a version-by-version upgrade, and rebuilt the platform on Laravel 13 in four months, in line with the original estimate. The new platform went live on 29 September 2026.

Challenges

1. Expensive, Over-Complex Hosting: The AWS setup cost $2,320 USD a month and was more complicated than the site needed.

2. End-Of-Life Technology: The platform ran on Laravel 5, PHP 7.4, Node 12, React 15, Elasticsearch 5.5 and Webpack 3. PHP 7.4 and Node 12 had been out of support for more than three years, so no security patches were coming.

3. Known Security Risk: A security audit found 18 PHP security advisories, 145 npm vulnerabilities including 23 rated critical, and 15 abandoned packages in the live platform.

4. Failing Libraries: The search library hadn't been maintained since 2017 and was creating duplicate background jobs and broken commands in production. Two competing login packages and a forked ReCaptcha package added more risk.

5. Unreliable Integrations: The MYOB integration relied on an access token hard-coded into the application rather than a proper OAuth connection, and had no protection against duplicate records or timeouts. The Thinkific course enrolments and Mailchimp list syncing were also unreliable, so a single failed request could leave a member without course access or on the wrong email list.

6. A Business That Can't Stop: Members renew, register for events and pay invoices every day. The old site had to keep running right up to the switchover, and more than 19 million records spanning 16 years had to come across with it.

7. Hidden From Search Engines: The old site published thousands of events, articles and resources, but had no XML sitemap, no meta descriptions and no structured data.

8. Slow, Expensive Changes: Every change meant working around outdated technology, so simple work took longer and cost more than it should.

Solution

1. A Full Rebuild, Not An Upgrade: Rather than stepping through eight major Laravel versions, we built a new Laravel 13 and PHP 8.4 application and moved the business logic across one area at a time: members and organisations, memberships, events and ticketing, the shop and checkout, finance, email and the public website. The new platform was tested on staging, then the existing load-balanced servers were pointed at it on launch day.

2. Technical SEO From The Ground Up: Every public page now has its own title, meta description and canonical tag. An XML sitemap lists more than 3,500 public pages. Events, news, videos, FAQs and breadcrumbs carry schema.org structured data, so Google can show richer results. Past and archived events are marked noindex, so search engines focus on events people can still book. Old ID-based event links 301 redirect to new, readable URLs. Read more about our technical SEO and website migrations.

3. A New Admin Panel: Ellen, the admin panel the Velg team use every day, was rebuilt on Filament 5 with more than 40 screens for members, organisations, events, tickets, attendees, invoices, newsletters and website content. Every form has clear labels and help text, and the team kept the navigation they already knew.

4. Checkout & Easier Payments: The old React cart and checkout was rebuilt in Livewire. Members can now pay an invoice straight from the link in their email without logging in, using secure signed links and Westpac PayWay.

5. MYOB Integration Rewritten: The hard-coded access token was replaced with a modern OAuth connection to MYOB. Tokens refresh automatically, and the finance team can reconnect MYOB from the admin panel without a developer. Each invoice is locked while it syncs and keeps its MYOB IDs, so a retry updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate invoice, payment or customer. MYOB rate limits and timeouts are retried a limited number of times, and anything that still fails is logged and picked up by a retry command. Invoices, payments and customers sync automatically, including $0 invoices and partial payments, so the finance team aren't re-keying data.

6. Thinkific Integration Rewritten: When a member buys an online course, they're enrolled in the matching Thinkific course automatically. The new integration checks for an existing enrolment first, so members are never enrolled twice, and reactivates lapsed enrolments instead of duplicating them. Requests have clear timeouts, and any enrolment that fails is kept and retried on a schedule, with an alert if one gets stuck.

7. Mailchimp Integration Rewritten: Member details and membership labels sync to Mailchimp automatically. Timeouts, rate limits and Mailchimp server errors are queued and retried rather than lost. Unsubscribes and bounces made in Mailchimp flow back to Velg through a secured webhook, and the sync respects them, so nobody is re-subscribed after opting out. Newsletters, email campaigns and event emails are all managed in the admin.

8. Search Replaced: The abandoned search library was replaced with Laravel Scout on AWS OpenSearch, with autocomplete and typo tolerance on the public site and in the admin. Rate limiting stops bots from overloading search.

9. Modern Infrastructure: Load-balanced servers managed through Laravel Forge, MySQL upgraded to 8.4 on Amazon RDS, Laravel Horizon for background jobs, file uploads straight to Amazon S3, and Sentry error monitoring. Velg is now on our ongoing maintenance and development support.

Key Features Implemented:

• New Laravel 13 application replacing an end-of-life Laravel 5 codebase
• XML sitemap covering 3,500+ public pages
• Meta titles, descriptions and canonical tags on every public page
• Schema.org structured data for events, news, videos, FAQs and breadcrumbs
• Noindex for past and archived events
• 301 redirects from old ID-based event URLs to readable URLs
• Admin panel rebuilt on Filament 5 with 40+ screens
• Memberships, renewals and organisation memberships
• Events, tickets, packages, attendees, attendance and feedback
• Livewire cart and checkout with Westpac PayWay
• Pay-by-link invoices without logging in
• MYOB integration rewritten with OAuth, replacing a hard-coded access token
• MYOB duplicate protection, timeout handling and automatic retries
• Thinkific course enrolment with duplicate checks and scheduled retries
• Mailchimp sync with queued retries and secured unsubscribe webhooks
• Laravel Scout search on AWS OpenSearch with autocomplete
• Newsletters, email campaigns and event emails
• Knowledge hub with resources, topics, news, videos and eZines
• Professional development records and exports for members

Results

1. 27% Lower AWS Costs: The monthly AWS bill fell from $2,320 USD to $1,700 USD, saving more than $7,400 USD a year, on simpler infrastructure with redundancy built in.

2. Visible To Search Engines: More than 3,500 public pages are now in an XML sitemap with structured data, where the old site had none. We're tracking impressions and clicks in Search Console as Google crawls the new site.

3. Delivered On Estimate: The rebuild took four months, in line with the estimate in the modernisation plan, and launched onto the existing load-balanced servers.

4. 19 Million+ Records Carried Across: More than 19 million records spanning 16 years moved to the new platform, including 128,000+ member records, 19,500+ organisations, 205,000+ event registrations, 228,000+ invoices dating back to 2010 and 16 million+ email campaign records.

5. Security Risk Removed: The platform went from 23 critical npm vulnerabilities and 15 abandoned packages to none, on supported versions of PHP, Laravel and Node that receive security patches.

6. Easier To Get Paid: Members can pay invoices from their email without logging in, and payments sync to MYOB without manual entry.

7. Integrations That Recover On Their Own: MYOB, Thinkific and Mailchimp now retry their own failures without creating duplicates, so finance records, course access and email lists stay accurate without someone checking them by hand.

8. Faster, Cheaper Changes: Velg now has a modern, well-organised codebase, so new features and fixes take less time and cost less to deliver.

Project Services Breakdown

• Platform Review & Modernisation Plan
• AWS Hosting Migration & Load Balancing (Laravel Forge)
• Custom Laravel Web Application Development
• Admin Panel Rebuild (Filament)
• Technical SEO, Structured Data & Redirects
• Data Migration (19 Million+ Records)
• MYOB Integration Rewrite (OAuth, Duplicate & Timeout Handling)
• Thinkific LMS Integration Rewrite
• Mailchimp Integration Rewrite
• Westpac PayWay Payments
• Search Rebuild (Laravel Scout & AWS OpenSearch)
• Ongoing Maintenance & Development Support

Technology Stack: Laravel 13, PHP 8.4, Livewire 4, Filament 5, Alpine.js, Vite, MySQL 8.4 on Amazon RDS, AWS OpenSearch, Amazon S3, Laravel Horizon, Laravel Forge with load-balanced AWS EC2 servers, MYOB, Westpac PayWay, Mailchimp, Mandrill, Thinkific, Sentry

Services provided

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