Classerly

Classerly is an education platform built for managing students, teachers, parents, and curriculum in a single system. Teachers create quizzes, lessons, and materials. Students access content, take solo and multiplayer quizzes, and play educational games. Parents monitor their children's progress. Administrators oversee the full operation through an analytics dashboard.

The client came to Cenciss after 2.5 years working with a previous developer who left them with an incomplete, unstable platform and no codebase handover. The code had to be extracted directly from the live server. There was no documentation, no clean architecture, and no functioning UI worth keeping.

The brief was a complete rescue: recover what existed, fix what was broken, redesign the interface, add the missing features, and deploy a production-ready platform. The client needed it done in under a month.

Code recovery was the first obstacle. The previous developer had not handed over the codebase, so everything had to be pulled from the live server and reverse-engineered without documentation. Understanding what was supposed to work, what was broken, and what was simply missing required a methodical audit before a single line of new code could be written.

The existing architecture was not salvageable as-is. The backend had structural problems that made maintaining or extending it impractical. Refactoring for scalability meant making architectural decisions under time pressure without the luxury of a greenfield build.

UI/UX was a complete replacement. The previous interface was poor enough that keeping any of it would have undermined the rebuild. Every screen for all four user roles, Admin, Teacher, Student, and Parent, had to be redesigned with a modern, intuitive interface that worked across devices.

The multi-role system required distinct permission sets, workflows, and dashboard experiences for each user type. Role-based authentication had to be enforced at the API level, not just the UI, with each role seeing only what they were supposed to see and able to do only what they were authorized to do.

Real-time features added complexity on a compressed timeline. Chat and notifications via Socket.io required proper authentication integration, message persistence, and connection handling for concurrent users across multiple roles.

AI integration used Google Gemini with context awareness tied to the student's current lesson, topic, and subject. A generic chatbot would have limited educational value. The implementation had to pass the right context with each query to produce responses relevant to what the student was actually studying.

Stripe subscription pricing was role-differentiated: parent plans were tiered by number of students, while teacher plans ran on monthly and yearly billing cycles. Both required webhook handling, subscription state tracking, and coupon system support.

All of this had to be completed and deployed in less than one month.

The process started with a full extraction and audit of the server codebase, mapping what existed against the intended feature set to establish what could be refactored and what needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

The backend was refactored onto a clean Node.js and Express.js architecture with restructured MongoDB schemas covering users, quizzes, lessons, materials, games, subscriptions, chat sessions, calendar events, and analytics data. JWT authentication was implemented with role-based middleware enforcing permissions at the API level across all endpoints.

The frontend was rebuilt in React.js and TypeScript with Material UI and Ant Design components, delivering a modern, responsive interface across all four user dashboards. The admin panel was built separately in Next.js with server-side rendering for analytics performance.

Teacher workflows covered subject and topic management, lesson and material creation with Google Docs integration, quiz builder with solo and multiplayer modes, calendar and event management, and student feedback tools. Student workflows covered content access, quiz participation, educational games with multiple difficulty levels and modes, and AI chatbot interaction. Parent workflows provided progress monitoring dashboards and calendar visibility. The admin dashboard surfaced user counts, quiz performance metrics, and subscription analytics.

Socket.io was integrated for real-time chat between roles and live notifications, with authenticated connections and message persistence to MongoDB.

Gemini AI was integrated with context injection per student session, passing current lesson, topic, and subject data with each query so the chatbot could respond with educationally relevant answers rather than generic responses.

Stripe was implemented with separate pricing logic for parent and teacher plans, webhook endpoints for the full subscription lifecycle, and a coupon system for discount management. Cloudinary handled all media and document uploads across the platform.