Lingora

About the client

Lingora is a 100% free community of native speakers and teachers to help you learn your chosen foreign language came our way for development and maintenance. And right then we knew that we’re going to love working on this project. Because our soaring fascination with traveling had also given birth to the urge of learning a foreign language. And Lingora was just the right kind of site for a multitude of people, who look forward to learning new foreign languages!

Learning a foreign language should not just be free but hassle-free too, believed Lingora. And hence, came up with a closed community that requires just registration and you’ve all the access to each and every audio posted on it. Once a registered member of the community, you can now record and upload audio files in your native language too.

Apparently, Lingora was a website serving the language learners in the best way possible. But then, ‘the best’ changes with time. Right? Hence emerged the requirement of building and later upgrading the website!

Why Drupal was chosen

Perceived to be a costly website building tool, Drupal is the most cost-effective one in today’s era. And we have some meritorious reasons to choose Drupal. It’s a challenge in itself to handle and build a website as expansive as this, which involves a humongous amount of people interaction and data sharing. In addition to that, the client also required multilingual support, audio conversion, and support for all the prime browsers and devices, use of taxonomy, commenting option on audios and much more for the website. All of these, along with a touch of professionalism and proficiency, were only possible with Drupal.

Project Goals

Our association with Lingora and Drupal has been quite old. This particular project has been divided into two phases, where we’re given a different set of goals, match a different set of requirements but got a successful outcome during both phases.

Our fundamental goal was to build and then upgrade the Lingora website to match its extensive usage and multilingual support for all the free members of the website. The structure and functioning had to be such that smoothens the entire process of learning a new language in a few clicks!

Requirements

Lingora had a few specific requirements during both phases, apart from the basic requirement of building a cost-effective, secure, highly efficient and user-friendly website. Those specific requirements are mentioned below:

• To be hosted on Acquia
• Users should be allowed to record/upload audio from all platforms
• Audios should be accessible from all platforms
• The commenting option should be available on all audios
• Push Notification feature needs to be added
• Addition of the Blog section
• Messaging made possible between two people, which will be visible to other members from the same language group
• Creating an e-commerce platform that includes – Online Product Creation, Maintain, Discount, Checkout & Payment via Stripe
• Users get points added to their profile for each of their activities, which they can eventually use for getting discounts on chargeable lessons
• The points earned were named Lingorock Points
• Lingorock points can be used to shop from Lingora’s online shop that includes different formats/packages meant for learning a language
• Lingorock points can be earned by helping others to learn a language you know
• Creating an all-time leaderboard on a monthly/weekly basis

Challenges

Every project comes with its own set of requirements, opportunities, and challenges. Yes, this one too had quite some challenges, which included adding quite a few challenging features to the website:

• Multilingual Site
• Native speakers can rate audios and provide feedback(s)
• Language-wise audio & user search
• Rating system
• Mobile responsive
• E-commerce platform

Outcome

Outcomes, sometimes, are not very descriptive; rather it turns out to be an experience in itself. This very project of Lingora was one such thing for us. The outcome and success of this very project were that the native speakers of multiple languages got an opportunity and platform to help the new language learners on an altogether different level. The popularity of Lingora has grown extensively in the past couple of years.

Technical specifications

Drupal version:

Drupal 7.x

Key modules/theme/distributions used:

• Bootstrap
• Media Recorder
• Audio Converter
• Halfstar
• Dropdown Checkboxes
• Internationalization
• Commerce Core

Why these modules/theme/distributions were chosen:

• Bootstrap: To use a custom theme based on it
• Media Recorder: To allow recording of audio from the browser itself
• Audio Converter: To convert audio into MP3 format
• Halfstar: To rate audios
• I18n: For multilingual features
• Dropdown Checkboxes: Convert multiple select lists to checkboxes

Custom Modules

Customized Message System

• Chat of the two learning language users will be visible to all those who are learning that particular language
• The core evaluator can read, like and dislike the messages of other users
• The core evaluator will also bag Lingorock points for self on liking the messages of other users

Notification System

• Members who are getting the Lingorock points will receive a notification, every time a text or video has been uploaded
• The Lingorock member will be sent a notification, every time he/she comes back online, for the message that was received when he/she was offline