[Hiring] PHP 8 Migration — Sage 9 Theme + Custom Plugin with Eloquent ORM

Hey Roots community — I posted here a while back asking about Sage 9→10 migration. After digging deeper into the codebase, I’ve decided to stay on Sage 9 and just fix PHP 8 compatibility. Now I need someone to actually do the work.

The situation: I run a test prep site on Sage 9 with a custom quiz plugin. Both use tareq1988/wp-eloquent which pins illuminate to ^5.4 — that’s the main blocker. The theme also has roots/sage-lib 9.0.5 pinning illuminate/view to ~5.6.

I’ve done a full source code audit and documented every PHP 8 issue in both the theme and plugin. This isn’t a discovery project — I know what’s broken and roughly how to fix it. I need someone comfortable with Composer dependency resolution, Sage 9 internals, and the illuminate/Eloquent stack to actually execute it and test it properly.

Key details:

  • Plugin: 4,500 lines PHP, Vue.js 2 frontend, 8 Eloquent models, Phinx migrations

  • Theme: 7,800 lines PHP, 66 Blade templates, 16 soberwp/controller Controllers

  • Two separate vendor directories that both need updating

  • Hosting on Cloudways (easy PHP version switching for staging)

Scope: Composer resolution, custom PHP fixes, staging testing, production deployment. No Sage 10 migration, no new features, no theme swap.

Budget: $3,500–$6,000 depending on approach. Flexible on hourly vs fixed.

Timeline: 4–6 weeks, no hard rush but PHP 7.4 has been EOL for 3 years.

If you’re interested, I can share the full technical breakdown with every dependency version, every PHP 8 issue, and my recommended approach for the wp-eloquent fork. DM me.

Thanks — and thanks for building such a great ecosystem. Even stuck on PHP 7.4, Sage 9 has been solid for years.

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