some serivce classes are getting to heavy, so some functionality will be
offloaded to custom helper function for better manageability and
readability.
a couple of place holders have been added to demonstrate how helpers
will be organized
Plugged in a basic auth classs for verifying members and a setting class
to retrieve site settings and return necessary info.
Very bare bones to start just to get it working and prep for the
additional features
Removed the Slim Framework from the codebase and installed the latest
Laravel version to be the new foundation for the project moving forward.
Code from the old version will now be ported to the new version.
