We proudly announce our second major student housing platform being launched in the Dutch city of Groningen. Reaching up to 55.000 students and connecting them with dozens of landlords.
Hundreds of students have found the platform within the first hours after the soft launch in July and every day tens of reservations are being made.
Maatwebsite specialises in grand scale cloud CRM applications in which we have years of experience with student housing platforms. Our platform offers CRM functionalities to manage students but augmenting it with advanced housing features like reservation modules, conversations with landlords and even a complete hotel-like managing of rooms with overviews for arrivals and departures.
Laravelisation
The newly launched AtHomeInGroningen.com is built using the Laravel framework. It is however not a native Laravel application but the platform has undergone something, what we call, “Laravelisation”: the process of adding Laravel to an existing project giving you the best of both worlds when it comes to scalability, maintainability and keeping the established business logic in place.
“Laravelisation”: the process of adding Laravel to an existing project giving you the best of both worlds.
In this case we do not want to use the word legacy to refer to our code. As we believe in continuously improving our projects by working together with our clients. This means, with changing needs, our software adapts and grows with the client’s business.
So, to adapt our software to Laravel we leveraged the Lumen framework (a lightweight Laravel) and using this as our foundation of our existing codebase. We opted for the latest version, meaning we have made all our code compatible with PHP 7.2. After migrating our old routing to Lumen’s fastroute (and after implementing a few minor additions like sessions) we actually had our housing platform running, on Laravel!
Contact us know if you want to know more about this process!
Written by Frank Peters, Lead Developer @ Maatwebsite
