Revue Tɩ́ɩ́ŋá

Tɩ́ɩ́ŋá is the journal of the Languages, Literatures and Development lab (LaLD) at the University of Kara, covering languages, linguistics, literature, arts and culture, with a focus on African languages. The public site lets readers browse published articles by discipline, period or keyword, read the French and English abstracts, and download the full text as PDF. A custom back-office lets the editorial secretary manage the whole catalogue: volumes, issues, articles, authors, disciplines and files. The journal is semestrial and runs in production at revue-tinga.com under ISSN 3078-3992. Article submission and peer review still happen by email; an online workflow for that is planned for a version 2.

The problem

The lab was launching a new journal that had no digital existence. Without an accessible online platform, the journal could not obtain an ISSN or meet the CAMES publishing requirements it had to follow, and its articles had no way of being distributed or referenced.

The approach

The journal was built as a single Laravel application on PostgreSQL, serving both the public site and a custom back-office. The data model follows the academic hierarchy: journal, volumes, issues, articles, with multi-author articles, disciplines and attached PDFs. The public side is a commercial HTML template integrated by hand into Blade; the back-office was built from scratch, with a step-by-step article entry flow and an automatic completeness check that blocks publication of an incomplete article.

The result

• The journal is live in production at revue-tinga.com and obtained its ISSN (3078-3992); the online platform was a prerequisite for it.
• The editorial secretary runs the journal on her own from the back-office: volumes, issues, articles, authors and PDF files, with no developer involved.
• Since 2024 the journal has published around forty articles across three volumes (2024 to 2026) on its semestrial schedule.

Key features

• Article catalogue with combined filters: discipline, time period, and full-text search on title and abstract
• Article pages with a French résumé and an English abstract, keywords, authors, formatted citation, DOI link and downloadable PDF
• Archives browsable by volume and by issue, grouped by year and month
• Editorial back-office: volumes, issues, articles, disciplines, users and roles
• Step-by-step article entry (metadata, then authors, then files) with an automatic check that blocks publication until the article is complete
• Create a co-author on the fly while filling in an article
• Editorial content pages: presentation, committees, editorial standards, reviewer instructions
• Password reset by email; back-office access restricted to the editorial team