I do like it when someone else saves me a lot of typing. Very much agree with all this. (Obviously the real problems are political, but ignoring that...) Seem

I do like it when someone else saves me a lot of typing. Very much agree with all this. (Obviously the real problems are political, but ignoring that...) Seems to me that after it's in source control and a dev/staging system exists, the next step is to add in a data access layer - move all the raw SQL etc out of the main codebase into either new PHP code or a web service. Then add a bunch of logging so it's possible to discover what parts of the system actually get used. The data layer can then get useful test coverage, allowing the DB to be safely rearranged. The next step is to treat the rest of the PHP app as a black box and write tests around it with something like Selenium, and the work of replacing it with some other boring but more modern technology bit by bit can begin.