The Nest: a white-label e-learning platform

The Nest exists because the same request kept arriving. Client after client at Digiton wanted somewhere to publish and sell their courses — a school, a training centre, a coach, each describing a slightly different version of one thing. Built one at a time, that is the same application five times over, diverging from the day each is delivered, with every fix applied by hand in five places.

So it was built once, as a product, and the question stopped being "what does this client need" and became "what does the shape of all of them have in common, and what has to stay configurable".

Packaged, not forked

• The core is a Composer package. Each client installation requires it rather than copying it.

• That's what makes white-labelling maintainable: a fix or a feature ships once and reaches every instance, instead of being applied by hand to a dozen diverging copies.

• Five instances run in production, two of them written up here — Flourishing Academy and Lotus Academy.

The platform

• Courses divided into lessons, with exams built from a question bank and every student response stored.

• Per-student progress across the structure.

• Rooms for live sessions.

• Three panels: admin, instructor and student.

Built to be sold internationally

• Multi-currency and multi-timezone, so an instance isn't tied to one market.

• A language switcher, for instances serving a non-English audience.

• Chunked uploads, so course video doesn't fail on a slow connection.

• Subscription plans per course and per category, with payment records.

Built by my team at Digiton, where I was CTO. I set the architecture, reviewed the work, and owned SEO, performance, responsiveness and the deploy.