meredo.de modernizes its website with an upgrade to TYPO3 v14

The Media Competence Center (Medienkompetenzzentrum) is a public educational center which operates under the Youth Welfare Office of Berlin. It functions as a public educational center dedicated to teaching media literacy, digital skills, and creative technology to children, young adults, families, and school groups.

Its website, meredo.de, which has been running on TYPO3 since 2006, is the center’s primary digital channel, where it communicates its services and engages its audience. In May 2025, collaborated with plus B GmbH to upgrade its TYPO3 version from v12 to v14.

The Media Competence Center’s long-term use of TYPO3 is attributed to the flexibility, stability, and editorial control the CMS provides. Although the previous version was still delivering a reliable digital foundation, the release of TYPO3 v14 presented a unique opportunity to build on that framework and deliver visitors an immersive experience. It also needed a strong digital platform to support the center’s course and youth camp bookings, event communications, and online learning tracks.

The center had already undergone a major relaunch of their initial TYPO3 instance in 2019, where a retro-gaming inspired frontend was one of the major outcomes. This established a more authentic connection with their audience, signaling that technology can be both accessible and fun, and delivering an immersive experience. 

The primary objective of this project was to establish a future-proof digital infrastructure by updating the TYPO3 core from v12 to the latest v14 release. The technical implementation of the new version had three core components. 

• Template Adjustments (vhs): As the "vhs" extension lacked compatibility with TYPO3 v14 at the time of the update, the plusB team manually restructured the templates to ensure seamless functionality.
• Powermail Migration: Since "powermail" was not supported during the initial planning phase, plusB successfully transitioned all existing forms to the native TYPO3 "tx_forms" system framework.
• Enhanced Spam Protection: plusB replaced the legacy captcha system with a modern security solution by successfully integrating the wsm_form_spamshield extension. 

“meredo.de is much more than a standard website for us — it is a digital extension of our Media Competence Center and an important access point for children, young people, families, schools and partner organizations. plus B understood both the technical requirements of our TYPO3 platform and the creative idea behind the project. Their structured, reliable and solution-oriented approach gives us the confidence that our website can continue to support our educational work in the long term. “

 – Martin Jablonski-Zimare - Vorsitzender meredo e.V.

The upgrade to TYPO3 v14.3 has brought about significant improvements for both the center’s editorial team and its audience. The upgraded website boasts a considerable reach, hitting around 160,000 requests per month from roughly 12,000 unique visitors. Additionally, the meredo.de editorial team has benefitted from the new user-friendly interface, its reliability and its security. 

The website also kept its signature retro-gaming look and feel, keeping the interactive frontend output as a core part of its identity, and a means of engaging visitors to its website.

With the upgraded TYPO3 instance fully operational, having been delivered in just one month, plus B will continue providing support, keeping their long-term collaboration with the center alive, and ensuring that the site runs smoothly.