Almuneer: A Custom Bilingual LMS with Pakistan-Centric Payment Workflows

The Challenge: Digitizing Faith-Based Education

Al-Muneer Markaz Taleem-o-Tarbiyat Foundation, a registered Islamic education and welfare institution, needed to digitize its curriculum delivery to reach students beyond physical classrooms—both locally in Pakistan and internationally. They required a platform that could handle paid and free enrollments, deliver video and live-streamed lessons, and issue verifiable bilingual certificates, all while respecting the payment preferences of a market heavily reliant on manual bank transfers.

The Solution: A Feature-Rich Custom LMS

I built Almuneer as a custom Learning Management System (LMS) using Laravel 12. Rather than forcing a generic off-the-shelf solution like Moodle, I engineered a platform tailored specifically to the foundation's workflow, offering three distinct portals for Admins, Teachers, and Students.

Key Features & Engineering Highlights

1. Pakistan-Centric Payment & Dual Pricing

In markets where card payment gateways are less common, manual bank transfers are essential. I designed a complete, admin-gated manual payment workflow:

• Students see dual pricing (PKR for local, USD for international visitors) based on IP geolocation.
• Upon selecting a paid course, they are shown Meezan Bank account details and can upload a payment screenshot.
• Admins review the screenshot, approve or reject the payment, and trigger in-app notifications to the student—keeping the entire verification workflow inside the LMS.

2. Bilingual English/Urdu UX & Certificates

Supporting the institution's local and diaspora audience required a true bilingual system. I implemented a session-based locale switcher (English/Urdu) and a comprehensive translation file with ~400 UI strings. For certification, I leveraged mPDF and ArPHP (khaled.alshamaa/ar-php) to handle proper Urdu glyph shaping and right-to-left (RTL) layout. The result is beautifully formatted bilingual certificates with a unique verification ID, allowing third parties to verify a student's completion at a dedicated public endpoint (/certificate/verify/{id}).

3. Complete Course Lifecycle & Secure Video Delivery

Teachers can build an entire curriculum with structured sections, lessons (video, file, or text), quizzes, and assignments. However, to maintain quality control, the platform enforces an Admin Approval Gate: teachers submit courses as drafts, and only admins can publish them. To protect video content, I utilized Laravel's private disks with signed temporary URLs, ensuring that paid/enrolled students can stream content securely while preventing direct file access and piracy.

4. Automated YouTube Live Integration

For live-streamed sessions, the platform integrates with the YouTube Data API v3. Teachers can provision a live broadcast directly from the lesson dashboard, and a scheduled cron command (youtube:sync-recordings) automatically fetches and records past broadcasts, seamlessly transitioning live lessons into on-demand recordings.

Architecture & Engineering Standards

The application adheres to strong Laravel MVC principles, utilizing 16 Service classes to keep business logic isolated from controllers, 18 Form Request classes for strict validation, and 7 PHP 8.2 backed Enums for type-safe role and status handling (e.g., CourseStatus, PaymentStatus). Developed steadily over 53 commits across 4.5 months, this project demonstrates a clean, maintainable foundation designed for real-world nonprofit operation.

The Result

Almuneer is now a fully operational, feature-complete LMS that fulfills the foundation's mission to "Revive Sacred Knowledge With Authentic Guidance." It proves that a single developer can build a robust, multi-role, bilingual e-learning system with niche payment workflows using nothing but modern Laravel and PHP, all while running efficiently on shared hosting.

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Interested in a custom LMS for your organization? Check out my other engineering projects or reach out to me to discuss how we can build a tailored solution for your unique educational needs.