NoteHub — Lecture Notes Marketplace

Overview

NoteHub is a digital marketplace where university students publish and sell their lecture notes, and other students discover and purchase them by course and university. The platform was built with Laravel on an MVC architecture.

The Need

High-quality lecture notes are in high demand, especially at exam time, yet they circulate through scattered channels such as messaging groups and print shops. This makes them hard to find and keeps the author's effort from being rewarded. The goal was to move that exchange onto an organised, searchable and trustworthy platform.

The Solution

• Accounts and roles — Users can act as both seller and buyer from the same account; an administrator role handles content moderation.
• Publishing — Notes are uploaded with a title, course, university, description and price; files are validated and stored securely outside public directories.
• Discovery — Search and filtering by course, university and keyword, with a preview and detail page for every item.
• Purchasing — A cart and order flow; purchased content collects in the user's personal library.
• Access security — Only the buyer and the owner can access the full file; every download request passes a server-side authorisation check.
• Reviews — Buyer ratings and comments help high-quality content rise in search results.

Architecture

The platform is built on Laravel's MVC structure. User, note, course, order and review entities are defined as Eloquent models with their relationships; business rules live in controllers and presentation in Blade views. The responsive interface uses Bootstrap and the data layer runs on MySQL. Form validation, CSRF protection and upload limits rely on the framework's built-in security mechanisms.

Impact

• Designing the data model before development ensured access rules are applied consistently and predictably.
• Tying file access to authorisation from the outset met the core security requirement of a paid-content platform.
• Combining the buyer and seller experience in a single account simplified the user journey.