DEV3 Learnova – Learning Management System Laravel Script with Quizzes, Certificates & Payouts

Our own learning management system in the DEV3 Laravel suite: Laravel 12 and Filament 4 on a shared DEV3 core, with one panel per role, a drip engine, a quiz engine, commission rules with a payouts ledger and dompdf certificates with QR verification, installed from a zip through a web wizard.

The problem it solves

An LMS is three products that share one database. Learners need a catalogue, a checkout and a lesson player that remembers where they stopped. Instructors need a course builder, a fair view of what they earned and a way to get paid. The school needs approvals, moderation and reports. Several of the hardest parts are about trust. Drip rules decide when content opens, so a lesson must not unlock early or stay locked for a paying student. Quiz scores decide who gets a certificate. Certificates are only worth something if an employer can check them. Commission splits and refunds are real money owed to real people, and a rounding error on every sale adds up. All of this had to install on ordinary PHP hosting: no Node.js, no guaranteed queue worker, one cron entry at best, and a buyer who expects a web installer rather than a terminal. Learnova also had to reuse the shared DEV3 Laravel core built with Deskly, adding only what is specific to teaching.

Architecture and approach

We built Learnova as a Laravel 12 application with three Filament 4 panels: /admin for the school, /instructor for the instructor studio and /student for learners, with registration. A user only sees the panels their roles allow, and an instructor or admin can also learn as a student. The lesson player is a Livewire component at /learn/<course>/<lesson>; the public website is Blade with a small vanilla-JS layer, which keeps the landing page at 33.4 KB of gzipped JS and CSS.

A shared DEV3 core

• One package, five products. Everything that is not about learning comes from dev3/laravel-core: the installer, typed and encrypted settings, branding, the Blade UI kit, motion and 3D helpers, demo mode, roles and permissions, the audit log, the payment gateways, backups, system health, the Sanctum API with OpenAPI, and English / Arabic with RTL. Learnova registers its roles, demo logins, seeders, settings and API paths through a product manifest and registers its own 3D presets, and the packaging script copies the core into the zip so buyers get one self-contained download.

Key design decisions

• A drip engine with one set of rules. A single service decides whether a lesson is open for an enrolment: preview lessons are always open, an absolute "available from" date wins next, then drip days on the lesson or its section count from the enrolment day, and sequential mode also requires the previous lesson to be complete. The same service returns the reason for every locked lesson, so the sidebar, the course page and the student's "upcoming unlocks" agree. Unlocks are calculated when a course is opened, so drip needs no cron job at all.
• A quiz engine that grades strictly and keeps every attempt. Multiple choice scores only when the chosen set equals the correct set, true/false checks one answer, and short answers are normalised for case, spacing and punctuation before matching any accepted answer. Each question carries its own points, the percentage is compared with the pass mark, attempt limits are enforced on the server, and every attempt is stored for the student, the instructor and the admin. A course completes only when every lesson is done and every quiz has a passing attempt, and completion issues the certificate.
• Commission resolved from the most specific rule. The platform rate for a sale is the course override, else the instructor override, else the category override, else the global setting. Amounts are integers in minor units: the platform fee is rounded half-up and the instructor gets the exact remainder, and coupon discounts and bundle prices are spread across the lines by largest remainder, so every split adds up to the cent. The rate is stored on each order line, so a later change never rewrites past sales.
• Payouts on a ledger, not a balance column. Each paid line adds a sale to the instructor's earnings ledger that becomes available after the hold period (14 days by default, the refund window). A refund writes a negative entry at once and revokes access; a payout request debits the ledger immediately, so the same money cannot be requested twice, and a rejection removes that debit. Fulfilment runs in a locked transaction and is idempotent, so a repeated gateway webhook cannot enrol twice or pay an instructor twice.
• Certificates that can be checked. Certificates are issued once per student and course, with a code such as LNV-7KQM-4XPA from an alphabet without look-alike characters. The student, course and instructor names are stored at issue time, so renames never alter an issued certificate. The landscape A4 PDF is rendered on demand by dompdf with remote loading switched off, and carries a QR code, generated locally, that links to /certificates/<code>. Anyone can check a code there or at /verify, and admins can revoke a certificate with a reason that the verification page then shows.
• Paid lesson files behind an access check. Uploaded videos and PDF handouts live on the private disk (or a private S3-compatible bucket), never under public/storage. The player gets a signed URL that expires after about two hours, and every request to /media/lessons/{id}/video or /pdf, including every seek, runs the same lesson-access rules again: preview lessons for anyone, the course instructor and admins, and enrolled students only once drip and sequential rules open the lesson (prerequisites are checked when they enrol). Local files are sent as Range-capable responses (206 Partial Content), and cloud disks redirect to a 10-minute pre-signed URL. Certificate PDFs follow the same idea: the verification page is public, the PDF is for its owner and admins. Videos linked from YouTube or Vimeo stay with that host's privacy settings.
• Two-factor sign-in from the shared core. The core adds an authenticator app (TOTP) with 8 single-use recovery codes and email codes to every panel. A Require 2FA for staff setting enforces it on /admin, instructors and students opt in, super admins can reset a user's 2FA (also php artisan dev3:2fa-reset), and demo logins skip the challenge so the showcase stays one click.
• An installer instead of a README. If .env is missing the app creates it and an APP_KEY, then redirects to the 5-step /install wizard: requirements, database (MySQL or SQLite, tested before writing), demo or empty data, admin account and a lock file. php artisan dev3:install does the same from SSH. vendor/ and public/build ship in the zip, and the queue defaults to sync, so one cron entry is the only server setup.
• Demo data generated by code. The seeders build a deterministic "Learnova Academy" in about ten seconds in one transaction: 8 instructors, 33 courses with 301 lessons, about 250 students and 650 enrolments over eight months, quiz attempts, certificates, reviews, Q&A and payouts. Course covers, avatars and bundle art are SVG generated by code, the lesson clips were rendered with ffmpeg and the PDF handouts with dompdf, so nothing in the demo carries a third-party licence.

The 3D and motion approach

• One small scene per page. The home hero shows an open book whose pages breathe and turn, with a graduation cap and a gold tassel floating above it and drifting glints, all following the pointer. The student dashboard shows a progress constellation: each enrolled course is a star sized by its lesson count and lit by progress, with a halo of lesson motes that light up as lessons are finished. Finished courses turn gold with a ring, and courses in the same category are linked.
• Cheap by default. three.js loads lazily as its own 187 KB chunk, the device pixel ratio is capped, scenes pause off-screen, reduced motion is respected, and poster images show without WebGL or when 3D is switched off in Settings → Branding. The hero relights for dark mode.
• Motion without a licensing question. Reveals, split text, parallax, counters and a magnetic call to action come from the core's data-attribute motion.js with Lenis smooth scrolling, not GSAP, which keeps resale licensing simple.

Quality gates and results

Learnova 1.0.1 passed all seven release gates of the DEV3 Laravel suite, run by one script against the packaged build:

• Static analysis: Pint clean, Larastan level 6 with 0 errors, and php -l on 301 files.
• Tests: 142 Pest tests with 616 assertions, including required money-path suites for checkout with coupons and bundles, refunds, commissions, enrolment, drip, quiz scoring, progress and certificates, and payouts, plus lesson-media access checks and two-factor sign-in.
• Front-end budget: 11.0 KB of JS and 22.4 KB of CSS gzipped on the public page against a 180 KB budget, with the 187 KB three.js chunk loaded only when a scene needs it.
• Databases: the demo and empty seeders run on both MySQL 8 and SQLite.
• Browser checks: 98 pages in headless Chrome with 0 console errors, plus 6 happy paths: a free enrolment and the player, a paid checkout with a coupon, a quiz, certificate verification and the PDF, an instructor payout request and an admin course approval.
• Installer: the release zip unzipped into a clean folder, installed through the /install wizard on MySQL with demo data, then signed in as the admin.
• Secret scan: 19,884 files in the 29 MB zip, clean.

The 118 screenshots and the two video tours were captured from the seeded demo across all three panels, light and dark mode and Arabic, and double as the listing's demo. Building the second product on the shared core also fed back into it: Learnova's change requests fixed link-button colours in the core stylesheet and made the release-gate script product-neutral for the other three scripts.

Version 1.0.1 hardened what buyers protect most: paid lesson videos and PDFs moved to private storage behind per-request checks, certificate PDFs became owner-only, and every panel gained two-factor sign-in. Known gaps are listed openly: a quiz's time limit is shown but not enforced by a countdown, the certificate document is English-only, videos linked from YouTube or Vimeo rely on that host's privacy settings, and the PayPal and Razorpay drivers have not been run against live accounts. Learnova is on the DEV3 marketplace, where the video tours and grouped screenshots show every screen.

Tech stack

Inside the build

Home page with a 3D book and mortarboard — A GPU-rendered open book and graduation cap float in the hero and follow the cursor, beside a course search.

Featured courses — Hand-picked courses appear as rich cards with generated cover art, ratings, lesson counts and level badges.