01 · The challenge
What needed solving
The client needed a single platform to host an entire community — paid memberships, events with interest / registration / attendance tracking, opportunity listings with applications, forums, blogs, sponsor relationships, donations, meeting requests inside communities, and admin moderation across every surface. Off-the-shelf community tools forced the team into 4–5 disconnected SaaS subscriptions with no shared identity or payment ledger.
02 · Our approach
How we framed the work
We started with a discovery sprint to map the user journey, business goals and real constraints. From there we wrote a fixed-scope plan: clear milestones, weekly review gates on a staging URL, and a written exit criterion for every phase. The web development space rewards teams that ship — not teams that plan — so we biased the engagement towards working software from week two onward.
03 · The solution
What we built
We built a unified Laravel 11 platform (PHP 8.2) with 25+ Eloquent models spanning communities, events, opportunities, forums, blogs, sponsors, donations and meeting requests. Payments run through a pluggable gateway abstraction (PaymentGateway + Credential + Transaction + Webhook) supporting Stripe and PayPal with live/test mode switching and a webhook retry queue. Notifications fan out across SMTP email, Twilio SMS and Firebase Cloud Messaging from a single dispatcher. RBAC is built on Spatie permissions with three auth surfaces — guest, frontend member, admin — and a moderation queue covers blog submissions, opportunity applications, sponsor inquiries, community-membership requests and meeting requests. The admin panel is full CRUD plus per-resource lifecycle actions (approve / reject / activate / deactivate / cancel / toggle) and statistics endpoints for every module.
04 · The results
What changed for the client.
Replaced 4–5 separate SaaS subscriptions with a single owned platform and shared identity
Stripe + PayPal gateways switchable from the admin UI — no code change to swap or add a provider
Every approval workflow (members, blogs, sponsors, opportunities, meetings) routed through one moderation queue
Tech stack
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