PHP 7 Advanced expertise required

Requirements: PHP 7, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript Minimum experience: 10 years+ Estimate duration: 1-5 days We are looking for an expert PHP developer who grew-up with the technology since the early days of the language, to step in and help us define a basic and simple framework or set of templates that we can reuse for future projects using the latest PHP 7+ version. This assignment might sound trivial for somebody with vast experience however we are looking for the best quality out there and not quantity, less is best, keeping things simple is better than over-engineered. --- What we are looking to achieve out of this small project? Phase 1: Create the basics for re-usable and scalable future applications: - Define and create the best method to connect to a MySQL database (PDO) - Be able to manage most of the MySQL operations, like: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, via PHP 7 classes (by example) - Create a rock solid login system - level management - minimum 3 level of access: Admin, Moderator, User. - server side validation + front-end JS validation - captcha verification - email activation - forget password - Protect against SQL injection and related vulnerabilities. - Follow the best practices in the field. Phase 2: After defining and building the foundation let’s create for example a simple news content application to put in action the Phase 1 classes, where we manage users, create articles and moderate related content as follows: - The application should allow full user management to create, edit, delete new users. - The application must be able to allow creation of articles and full management of them, create, edit and remove. - Each author must be able to control their own articles, Master Admin is the only account that can get access to all the users, articles, comments, photos and level of access for the application. - Articles should allow WYSIWYG HTML Editor - Articles should allow images (GD library) and comments (based on user registration) - Categories and additional sub-categories for articles - Advanced Search feature within the db for articles, paginate results - We can provide a basic database table structure as a start if requires. Notes: - This solution must be written from scratch, without any aid or integrate any part of an existing framework, the code must be clear and easy to understand, you have the power to define the architecture - Comments, wiki and documentation must be provided - Example should be provided for future re-usable of the classes and functions, eg. how easy can new fields be implemented/added into the db and later managed by the php script. - Use friendly URLs, .htaccess re-writes - The application must be tested for all the possible scenarios and bug free. - Produce production ready code but keep comments in and don't minify the mark-up We are aware that there are many similar scripts out of the box available but we are looking to do this exercise for a completely different reason, in order to have a well written but simple "boilerplate", not framework depended, and be able to adopt on future projects.