The Port Journey

This section is the deep-dive that Changes & Improvements summarizes: the full story of taking Subfolio from a dead Kohana 2.x / PHP 5.6 stack to a static Astro site on Cloudflare Pages — including how the work itself was built with a DeepSeek fan-out workflow behind a Claude Code proxy. The same rule applies here as everywhere on this site: every figure is quoted from a committed, already-measured engine document or a primary source — nothing is a recalled number.

The short timeline

The engine repo’s docs/ROADMAP.md is the canonical phase record; its history is visible commit-by-commit in the repo log. In order:

1. Phase 0 — Capture the spec. Behavior extracted from the PHP engine (Filebrowser.php / Subfolio.php / FileKind.php) into eight stack-agnostic specs (docs/spec/), so the port had a contract before it had code.
2. Phase 1 — Astro content loader. The riskiest piece first: a custom loader that walks a Subfolio directory/ tree and interprets every naming convention as typed data.
3. Phase 2 — Themes → Astro components. The default theme’s PHP views ported to Astro components on real routes, keeping markup and CSS close enough to diff visually against the live PHP app.
4. Phase 3 — Build pipeline & deploy. sharp thumbnails, RSS fetch, and sass at build time; live on Cloudflare Pages with test-gated GitHub Actions auto-deploy.
5. Phase 5 — Enhancer polish. Markdown body rendering, .pop popups, .slide slideshows fixed, .oplx build-time zip artifacts. (Phase 4 — an auth Worker enforcing -access — is deliberately deferred until gated folders are a real need.)
6. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility pass, later wired into CI as a deploy gate.
7. Milestone 6 — Performance & build modernization. Five phases (A–E) of measured asset, image-format, JS, and SEO work — the numbers behind the Performance and SEO pages.
8. The curated demo front door and AGPL attribution polish that shipped the public demo.

The pages

• Why the Port — the EOL stack, and the Go detour that came before Astro
• Architecture — request-time PHP to build-time static: what carried over, what was rewritten
• The DeepSeek Workflow — how the port was actually built: the DeepClaude proxy, the fan-out pattern, and what it cost
• Performance — the measured before/after: fonts, CSS, deferred JS, WebP/AVIF thumbnails
• SEO — canonical URLs, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and the test suite that gates the deploy on them
• Security — the attack surface a static port removes, what it doesn’t, and one honest incident postmortem
• Deploying for Free — Cloudflare Pages + GitHub Pages, and what the PHP original required instead