A local dog shelter needed a better website.
Not a prettier brochure. A working website.
CAPA Póvoa de Lanhoso needed people to find dogs, understand the adoption process, see how they could help, and get in touch without digging through a mess. The shelter also needed a practical way to keep dog profiles and photos up to date without calling a developer every time something changed.
So I built it.
The site has searchable dog listings, individual profiles, photo galleries, adoption information, ways to help, and an admin area for managing the animals. It works on phones. It is fast. It is bilingual. More importantly, it was built around a real shelter with real data, real constraints, and hundreds of real dog photos.
You can see it running at capapvl.org.
Then I open-sourced the whole platform.
The repo is called Paws Platform. It is MIT licensed, which means you can fork it, change it, and deploy it for a shelter or rescue in your own community.
That matters because most local shelters do not need another blank template. Blank templates still leave someone staring at an empty folder, making a hundred decisions before they help a single animal. They need a working starting point: the pages, listings, profiles, data structure, photo handling, responsive layout, and admin workflow already connected.
The expensive part is rarely writing one homepage. It is turning dozens of small requirements into a system people can use. Paws Platform gives you that system. Replace the name, colors, content, dogs, and contact details. Keep what works. Improve what does not. Ship it.
If you are learning to build with AI, this is also a better project than another fake SaaS dashboard. Pick a shelter near you. Ask what is broken. Fork the repo. Make the site useful for them. You will learn more by solving one real problem for real people than by generating ten portfolio demos nobody needs.
You do not need my permission. That is the point.
Fork Paws Platform, improve it, and give your local shelter a website that helps more animals get seen.