All The Things Light

Building All The Things Light required more than creating a conventional content website. The platform needed to bring together multiple content types and user experiences—music, albums and singles, lyrics, podcasts, writing, reflections, inspirational resources, community participation, membership and newsletter functionality—while keeping the experience cohesive and easy for the client to manage.

A major challenge was designing the application as a flexible, database-driven platform rather than a collection of static pages. The CMS needed to support structured content, reusable content relationships, media management, SEO controls and different member experiences.

The project also required a production-ready infrastructure capable of running the Laravel application reliably with containerized services, background processing, caching/session management, secure HTTPS, automated deployments and health checks.

As Full-Stack Developer & Cloud/DevOps Architect, Softphoria led the end-to-end technical implementation—from Laravel application development, CMS architecture, database and backend development and responsive frontend implementation through to Docker containerization, AWS production infrastructure and GitHub Actions CI/CD.

Custom Laravel application & CMS

Developed a custom Laravel-based modular web application with a Blade/Livewire public experience and a Filament-powered administrative CMS. The platform provides structured content management for music, albums, singles, lyrics, podcasts, writing, reflections, inspirational resources, community content and other editorial experiences. Reusable content structures allow the client to manage and publish new material without requiring development changes for routine content updates.

Membership, music & community

The membership architecture supports guest and registered-member experiences, with user registration, email verification and membership/subscription functionality designed into the platform. Music and media functionality includes structured album and single management, reusable listening experiences and controlled playback/access behavior.

• Music: albums, singles, tracks, lyrics, music metadata and reusable listening pages

• Podcast: episodes, episode metadata, topics and an embedded listening experience

• Writing / Light Posts: poetry, reflections and community-submitted or editorial content

• Inspirational Resources: books, authors and community-shared recommendations

• Site-wide search, newsletter sign-up, transactional email notifications and a reusable Media Library

SEO & performance

The application also includes SEO metadata, Open Graph/social metadata, canonical URLs, sitemap and robots handling, structured data support, a responsive UI, image/performance considerations and CMS-controlled content.

Cloud infrastructure & CI/CD

For production, the application was containerized and deployed on AWS EC2 using Docker Compose, with Laravel/PHP, MariaDB, Redis-backed sessions/cache/queues, an Nginx web server, a queue worker and a scheduler. GitHub Actions was implemented for automated deployment from the project repository to the production server, including application build, database migrations, service restart and post-deployment health verification.

HTTPS and DNS were configured for the production domain with automated SSL certificate renewal.

Email & Notification Infrastructure

Implemented AWS-based transactional email and notification infrastructure using Amazon SES and Amazon SNS for reliable application email delivery and event-driven notifications, integrated with the Laravel application and production environment.

Delivered a production-ready digital platform that combines content publishing, music and media, community participation and membership functionality within a single custom Laravel application.

The client receives a flexible CMS-driven platform that can continuously grow with new music, podcast episodes, writing, resources and community content without requiring the underlying website to be rebuilt.

The project also demonstrates a complete end-to-end delivery capability—from application architecture and full-stack development through database design, CMS implementation, Docker-based deployment, AWS infrastructure, HTTPS configuration and automated CI/CD.

The resulting architecture provides a maintainable foundation for future features while keeping everyday content management accessible through the administrative CMS.