TheFormTool
Complete e-commerce platform migration from CakePHP to WordPress/WooCommerce with complex license generation, renewal logic, and custom business workflows for document automation software.
Summary
TheFormTool provides offline document automation software for Microsoft Word, serving legal professionals, businesses, and consultants worldwide. The platform supports advanced licensing, renewals, and seat-based access for professional workflows.
Code Cobalt migrated TheFormTool’s e-commerce platform from CakePHP to WordPress and WooCommerce, modernizing the system while preserving all existing business logic. The work included translating a complex VBA-based license generation system into PHP and maintaining full compatibility with existing licenses, renewals, and customer data.
The Challenge
TheFormTool required a full migration of its e-commerce platform from CakePHP to WordPress and WooCommerce while preserving all operational behavior and customer entitlements.
A core requirement was maintaining exact parity with an existing VBA-based license generation system that governs license validity, renewals, and seat allocation. Any deviation in calculations or behavior would impact existing customers and licensing outcomes.
The platform also relied on interconnected systems including renewal proration, seat management, custom user fields, product-specific fulfillment instructions, bulk pricing rules, selective guest checkout, historical data migration, and legacy password support.
Our Solution
Code Cobalt executed a structured migration to WordPress and WooCommerce, preserving system behavior while transitioning to a modern e-commerce foundation.
The VBA license generation logic was translated to PHP with a focus on behavioral equivalence. The new implementation was validated against existing license data to ensure consistent outputs across license creation, renewals, and seat assignments.
The migrated license engine produces the same licensing outcomes as the legacy system, ensuring full continuity for existing customers.
A highly customized WooCommerce implementation was built to support TheFormTool’s requirements, including Stripe and PayPal payment processing, renewal logic with automatic proration, seat and license grouping across renewals, custom user fields and account metadata, product-specific email instructions, bulk pricing tiers, and selective guest checkout.
Custom order numbering, tailored admin screens, and exportable reports were implemented to support operations and reporting. Comprehensive migration scripts imported users, orders, and transaction history, including support for legacy passwords.
Custom e-commerce tracking was implemented using Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, and Google Ads to support reporting and marketing optimization.
Results
The migration transitioned TheFormTool to a modern WordPress and WooCommerce platform while preserving all licensing, renewal, and fulfillment behavior.
Existing licenses, renewals, seat groupings, and customer data continue to function as expected. Complex purchasing scenarios such as bulk orders, proration, and guest checkout are fully supported, and custom administrative tools provide improved visibility and control.
The platform is now easier to maintain and extend while retaining the sophisticated business logic that underpins TheFormTool’s core product.
Over the years we've used more than a dozen firms for our various IT projects; they've varied from small, simple, and straightforward to highly secure complete e-commerce environments for international sales and data storage. Some have been fire drills, others years' long developments costing well into six figures.The firms have varied from solo practitioners with specialized skill sets, to large domestic and offshore IT providers with departments of experts. Never have we been as pleased with a relationship as we have been with Jason Gevargizian and Code Cobalt. We described our project as "Migrate Store to WordPress, WooCommerce, and Stripe" but that's a little like saying "Let's build a pencil." Changing the internals of a system that's been in place for a decade, with thousands of customers, using complex formulas and algorithms in old languages, while extricating us from the most burdensome PCI reporting requirements and reducing our payment processor and merchant bank costs could have been a nightmare. It wasn't. An unexpected benefit has been the nearly complete elimination of abandoned new account registrations and shopping carts that we credit to a more intuitive customer UI experience. The best part, we've truly enjoyed working with Jason. He's intelligent, forward-looking, technically expert, and a gentleman. In every case from now on, he will be our first choice for any project he regards within his wheelhouse. Based on our experience that covers almost everything IT.
Bob C.
TheFormTool