T3Rookies build website for Romanian orphanage

Categories: Community, Education & Certification, Press Created by Danijela Weißgraeber
Promotion of young talent at summer camp
Baar, 2015-07-14. Junior staff of the TYPO3 community tested their programming skills at a summer camp in Romania. The "Rookies" had one week’s time to develop a new site for a children's home with support from experienced TYPO3 developers. They not only learned how to look after a project of their own from the ground up, but also trained their English skills and gained cultural experience. The summer camp is part of the T3Rookies project, with which the TYPO3 community is promoting youth.
The children and teenagers at the orphanage "Aksza" in the Romanian town of Cluj are between seven and 20 years of age. Aksza helps them to study – from school until they attend a university. Before, the home was unable to afford to have a website to present itself on the Internet. That has changed now, however, thanks to the commitment of Arxia and the T3Rookies initiative of the TYPO3 community. The junior developers Anton Kösling (19), Jana Kienast (21), Altan Tosun (25) and Nicolas Ries (22) spent a week together with TYPO3 professionals from Arxia at the summer camp in Cluj to develop a website for the orphanage. It will go online in English, Romanian, Hungarian and German. The young people were responsible for its design, the structure of the site, content, programming and search engine optimization (SEO).

„We had a lot of fun“

The special thing about this project is that the newcomers ("Rookies") got to know the children and staff of the home in the shortest time to be able to tell their stories on the website. The summer camp thus changed from being a site workshop into a real life experience. "We had a lot of fun, not only at work, but also when we went out at night," summer camp participant Nicolas from Berlin said. "At my company, we mainly work on existing sites, therefore it was a new experience for me to build a whole new site as part of a four member team," he concludes. Jana is also quite enthusiastic: "It's great to work for a good cause. For this reason, I will continue to manage the platform after the summer camp ends," she says. Jana is an apprentice at "PHTH," a TYPO3 agency based in Cologne. In turn, Alex Dinis, a Rookie from Cluj, Romania, paid a visit to PHTH in Cologne and also helped to implement a project there, a mutual exchange on learning from each other and making TYPO3 known in Romania. With T3Rookies, the TYPO3 community would specifically like to promote youth. Young people who deal with TYPO3 at school, during their training or while studying find support here. These individual are mainly young adults between 16 and 25 years of age. In addition, the Rookies are to be networked and integrated into the TYPO3 Community. The T3Rookies have their own website: <link http: t3rookies.net _blank>t3rookies.net and their own Facebook group "3Rookies." They are also active on Twitter: @t3rookies. The organizing team can be reached by sending an e-mail to <link>rookies@typo3.org.