How Kenner Soft Built a Military Informational Portal with Strapi

Kenner Soft developed a military training portal for Ukrainian citizens, built using Strapi. This platform allows individuals to learn and master critical knowledge, organize volunteer efforts, and connect with like-minded people.

To ensure that the portal functions fully, the developers integrated a standardized portal for public services Diia, a chat system based on Zulip, a CRM system utilizing Espo CRM, and hosted learning videos on Cloudflare Stream.

The platform implements access control by location and IP address. An access control system was created for private, time-limited access to paid content.

The Challenge

There is a wealth of military information available online, but it is often incomprehensible to civilians. Finding the right content for specific military purposes requires specialized knowledge.

With the help of this portal, it is possible to receive professional advice from experts and also acquire specific knowledge. This way you won’t spend excessive time searching for materials.

The freely accessible online portal provides essential, structured knowledge presented in clear, simple language and designed specifically for absolute beginners.

The developer of the platform - Kenner Soft has encountered some major challenges in the realization:

• Rapid Development: The portal needs to be launched as quickly as possible.
• Anonymous yet Accessible: Access had to be anonymous for users while simultaneously being available to every Ukrainian citizen.
• Community and Mentorship: The platform requires functionalities for users to connect with mentors and the broader community.
• Scalability and Ease of Management: The portal needed to be flexible for future expansion and simple to manage.

The Solution

Kenner Soft opted to develop the portal using Strapi, a clear choice given its frontend flexibility and compatibility with any modern framework.

The development team selected Vue.js to display dynamic content, leveraging their existing expertise with it, which significantly contributed to the project's rapid completion. Strapi itself offers an efficient development environment, a user-friendly interface, and a built-in API for content management.

For account management and role-based access, Kenner Soft team has integrated EspoCRM. This simple, free, and robust CRM system provides seamless content management. It allows each municipality to design its own homepage individually and manage the content independently.

The portal offers the ability to manage content for different communities through a separate admin area.

To address the challenge of anonymous yet open access for Ukrainians while restricting others, Kenner Soft integrated the state service Diia.

Authorization on the portal is granted only to users with a Diia digital passport, which every Ukrainian citizen possesses. To safeguard individual anonymity, this personal data was encrypted, ensuring only general public information is accessible to unauthorized users.

Currently, there are five communities involved in the project. Each community has specific content and learning materials.

There are also educational videos that can be live streamed on the platform thanks to Cloudflare Stream. It is possible to upload videos directly to the stream with unique, one-time upload URLs and track video analytics for each creator. Access to videos is controlled using SSO. Therefore, video materials can only be viewed on the community website.

Cloudflare Stream was chosen because of its affordable price, and the ability to restrict access to videos.

To ensure version control, all users involved in the project can track all changes and continue working on them via Git. This allows them to see every step of development.

The Result

The project was completed incredible fast – just in one month. Kenner Soft developed a portal that has been successfully launched and is actively being developed with new functionalities.

This solution allows people from the same community to be united with a single goal. The platform has already garnered significant interest, with the total number of registered users exceeding 8,000 and growing.