Preserve every account
Students had to sign in to the new platform with their existing passwords. A mass password reset would have meant lost students and a support backlog.
Case study · Education · Live in production
Moving a 14,800-student learning platform off WordPress without a single forced password reset.
A full-stack learning platform in English, Somali and Arabic that replaced a WordPress and LearnDash estate, carrying every student, enrolment and course across intact.
- 14,843
- students migrated to the new platform
- 57,385
- course enrolments carried across
- 5,900+
- original certification practice questions
- 0
- forced password resets
Hurbad is a technology education provider whose students learn IT, networking and cybersecurity, largely on mobile devices. Its original platform ran on WordPress, LearnDash and WooCommerce: workable at small scale, but slow, hard to extend and difficult to secure as the student base grew.
The brief was a modern platform that could support video courses, practice exams, career tools and local payment methods in three languages, without disrupting the thousands of students already enrolled.
The challenge
What made it hard.
Two password formats
The legacy database held passwords hashed in two different formats, both of which had to be verified correctly on the new platform.
Dirty legacy data
The database export contained text stored in the wrong character encoding, corrupting names and course titles, as well as duplicate student accounts.
Three languages, one right-to-left
English, Somali and Arabic, with Arabic requiring a full right-to-left layout rather than translated strings alone.
Our approach
How we solved it.
- 01
Rebuilt on a modern stack
A Next.js platform on Vercel with a PostgreSQL database, video delivered through a global CDN, and internationalisation built in from the start.
- 02
Compatibility-first authentication
The new platform verifies both legacy password formats and upgrades them transparently, tested against a real WordPress instance before cut-over.
- 03
Rehearsed migration
Encoding repairs, account de-duplication and data mapping were scripted and rehearsed, then executed on production in a single planned migration.
- 04
Published state of production
A production-readiness ledger records what is live, what is built but not deployed, and what is unverified, so nobody mistakes a plan for a shipped feature.
Highlights
Also delivered.
- 205 courses on the new platform, with video delivered through a global CDN
- Practice exams for nine certifications (CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, Linux+, Tech+ and Cisco CCNA, ENCOR, ENARSI) in an exam-faithful engine with exhibits, matching and fill-in items, written from public objectives with no vendor questions reproduced
- Five free career tools: CV and cover-letter builders, a typing tutor, spaced-repetition flashcards and a password checker, abuse-tested before launch, with four defects found and fixed
- Full English, Somali and Arabic support with right-to-left layout
Technology
The stack.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Vercel
- CDN video streaming
- Sentry
What comes next
Hands-on networking and cybersecurity labs, local mobile-money payments and native mobile apps are built or in progress and will be released as each passes production verification.
Hurbad, Watin, TravelOS and CaafimaadAI are platforms built and operated by the Resolv team as our own ventures. We publish them because they are the clearest evidence of how we work: the same people, standards and methods we bring to client engagements.
More work
Other platforms we have built.
Education · Live on iOS and Android
Hurbad Mobile
A native learning app for iOS and Android, engineered to pass app-store payment policy by design.
Financial services · Live platform
Watin
A compliance-first accounting and e-invoicing platform engineered for a national tax mandate.
Travel & hospitality · In development
TravelOS
Taking East African travel agencies from WhatsApp and spreadsheets to a secure operating system.
Health & wellness · In development
CaafimaadAI
AI skin readings with biometric privacy designed in from the first line of code.
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