Learning platforms for Inkstone
How we built and evolved a custom learning platform family for an Auckland EdTech business, from legacy Drupal stack to a multi-tenant, enterprise-grade system serving Japan's top professional firms.
Inkstone delivers 1-to-1 professional English lessons to high-value Japanese corporate clients: the Tokyo offices of tier-1 management consultancies, civil engineering firms, and legal practices. When the engagement began in 2016, the technology stack was a Drupal 7 website, Skype for lessons, SuperSaaS for bookings, and manual lesson records. There was no in-house technical function.
Over ten years, Palefire became that function.
The starting point
The business was running on tools designed for other purposes. Skype was not built for structured language teaching. SuperSaaS could schedule, but knew nothing about teacher availability across time zones. Lesson notes lived in email threads and spreadsheets, disconnected from payroll.
The brief was to build something better, without disrupting live teaching operations for enterprise clients with zero tolerance for service gaps.
What we built
Custom booking system. A timezone-aware scheduling engine built within Drupal 7, replacing SuperSaaS entirely. Teacher availability managed across multiple continents, with scheduling logic that understood the difference between a Tokyo 9am and an Auckland 9am.
TEFTalk: browser-based video lessons. We replaced Skype with a purpose-built video conferencing platform using Twilio Programmable Video and Chat. The React front-end was built from scratch, initially backed by a REST API and later evolved to a GraphQL backend as lesson data requirements grew more complex.
Integrated lesson records. Real-time in-lesson note-taking, synced to Drupal every 10 seconds. Notes fed directly into payroll and student reporting, eliminating the duplicate data entry that had previously burdened every teacher after every session.
Points and assessment system. Student effort tracking, preparation scoring, and attendance logging, with idempotent payroll reporting orchestrated via AWS Step Functions. Pay runs could be re-run safely from the same booking and lesson data with identical results.
Multi-platform architecture. Core features were refactored into reusable components, turning The English Farm from a single product into the foundation for a family of learning applications. The first spin-off, Kōrero Online (Māori language teaching), launched from the shared codebase.
The Drupal 9 migration
The platform had been built on Drupal 7. When Drupal 7 reached end of life, there was no upgrade path. A full rewrite was required. We executed this as a big-bang migration under a hard contractual deadline from an enterprise client, with live teaching operations continuing throughout.
Zero service interruptions across all enterprise clients. The platform launched on the new stack on schedule.
Enterprise security audit
The business serves the Japanese offices of some of the world's most security-conscious professional firms. A tier-1 consultancy required a full PII audit at its highest sensitivity level before onboarding.
A lean technical team passed. The architecture and data handling practices were sufficient for the most demanding enterprise requirement we faced.
Scaling under pressure
A major new enterprise client came on board rapidly, producing load spikes at multiples of previous peak capacity. We diagnosed and resolved database performance bottlenecks under production pressure, and the platform scaled to meet demand without service degradation.
Where things stand
The engagement is now in its tenth year. The platform continues to serve the business, the distributed technical team spans six locations across the UK, Spain, Hungary, Florida, and Utah, and the shared codebase supports a growing family of learning applications.
The original mandate (supply a technology capability to a business with none) has grown into something more durable: a platform architecture that can carry the business for the next decade.