FAIR Package Management for TYPO3

Karim Marucchi:
Good morning, my name is Karim Marucchi from Crowd Favorite and today we are speaking to you from the Hackathon at CloudFest here in beautiful Rust, Germany at Europa Park. I’m very excited this year because we are part of the Fair TYPO3 hackathon group. And with me here today I have Brent and Benny who are the project mentor, pro lead, co lead and the lead of TYPO3, who we’ve been working very tirelessly and you’re going to hear all about it today. So, Brent, you’ve been with the FAIR project since the beginning.

Brent Toderash:
Yes.

Karim Marucchi:
And tell us a little bit of the background about fair.

Brent Toderash:
Well, FAIR is an acronym, of course. It stands for Federated and Independent Repositories. So it is a system of updating software or distributing digital goods, essentially. So it’s a software supply chain that is distributed rather than being controlled by one sort of monolithic entity. So it has a governance structure that keeps it independent. Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
Right. And FAIR originally was made to solve the problem of supply chain risk around WordPress. So what was interesting was since roughly January of 2025 through June of 2025, there was a lot of development around the first prototype and working proof of concept of fair. And then from June towards the end of the year of 2025, it really became production ready and was tested at scale, had security audits and did a lot of good work towards being available as an alternative way to maintain WordPress.

Brent Toderash:
Yes.

Karim Marucchi:
And its ecosystem.

Brent Toderash:
Yeah. And it’s important to say that although WordPress was sort of the sort of some drama there, that was the impetus to get started with fair. When we designed the FAIR protocol and implemented the first working versions, we made it to be platform agnostic, so it can work with WordPress. But from the very outset we said, well, let’s design this to be to just work for anything and then we’ll just add in the little WordPress bits and then if we need for a different platform or for a different system, if we need to add in a few other little augmentations, we’ll do that. But its design is to work for any kind of digital build.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, yes, and that was the concept from the version beginning exactly when, when Joost and I posited the possibility of fare. We wanted it to try and be as agnostic as possible.

Brent Toderash:
Yeah, because it was, it was not only technical independence, it’s also a supply chain management, risk management strategy.

Karim Marucchi:
Right. So once we were in that development phase, that’s when we started talking about, well, do we do things the WordPress way or using Laravel and other tools, do we make sure it’s agnostic? What I’m really proud of how the technical team approached it is there’s certain things that were sort of built for WordPress first, but as we now talk to Benny here in a minute we’re going to find out a lot of the things were actually built in a way that made it easier to accomplish what we’re doing this weekend. So now Benny, can you tell us do a little self introduction for the folks who don’t know TYPO3 and you very well.

Benni Mack:
Yeah. So I’m Benny, I’m the Typo3 project lead. I’ve been working with Tableau3 since, I don’t know, 23 years. So I’ve seen a lot of similarities between WordPress and Temporal3 in the past 15 years. And Tempo3 grew into a more sophisticated application where you have a lot of enterprise features built in natively at the same time and switching to or migrating towards a composer based installation process while still keeping the backwards compatibility like WordPress. So what TYPO3 has, it’s a content management system after all, it’s based on PHP GPL 2. It has all the things we know and we love also in WordPress and Drupal and Joomla. And at the same time it also is so popular, especially in Germany, because of the extensibility. So I think back then when CMS grew and got bigger, that was the key factor. And TYPO3 has that as well. So Tapo 3 is probably one of the top five open source content management systems and we have a classic mode where we have extensions, basically plugins to extend the base core system. And we have a similar situation, we have a platform on a technical level, similar situation, we have a platform where all these plugins are, these extensions are located and people can download it from their systems, from their installations right away.

Karim Marucchi:
Right. So Typo three cut real quick for Bob for later. Taco, you’re going to want to get this in video. Tell me when you’re ready, Taco. Yeah, okay. And go. So Benny, TYPO3 for years has already had an extensive way to update and you as a project already use Composer every day.

Benni Mack:
Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
So lately in the WordPress world, there’s been a lot of buzz around what’s happening with package managers and Composer and that kind. So in this weekend’s hackathon, what kind of updates are you looking to try and make to Fair?

Benni Mack:
So first of all, I need to go back a little bit. I think back in 2017 we started with this Composer mode maybe earlier, and we had a separate domain, composer.typo3.org, and it served as a similar infrastructure as packages, the main platform for all Composer based installations natively. And it was built as a wrapper for our plugins and extensions to be used. Turned out we had a lot of workarounds and it’s just our ecosystem, our plugins inside the core, we migrated towards a more standardized way of, of dealing with the composer manifest JSON file to actually become native composer based. So we’re actually, we could delete composer typo3.org, because we’re now using the global system that everybody else uses with Symphony and Laravel out of the box. But we have still the classic, the non composer mode for our installations out there and we want them to also make use of that. And with that and this week’s outcome, we made it possible to move all the packages that we have on our extension repository, moved into Fair and fair, become a Composer plugin to also fetch the data from all sources. So it’s basically merging everything together. We funded for a long time.

Karim Marucchi:
That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. So as we sit here and we’re recording this, we are four hours from the end of the hackathon. What do you hope to accomplish? What do you hope to be able to announce on stage?

Benni Mack:
In general, I would say about the

Karim Marucchi:
outcome of this weekend.

Benni Mack:
Yes, the outcome of this weekend is like we wanted to make sure, we wanted to see if the FAIR protocol is really so robust in a way that we can actually make use of it. Before we had our own bubble and now what we’ve accomplished so far is actually take all of our extensions and bring it into a fair compatible format at the same time, modify our core system to also fetch data from a fair compatible repository, any repository. In this way, it’s really the federated approach. That we can now dock into any kind of system and it doesn’t matter if it’s from typo3.org or from any other platform. Obviously we only currently only support Table 3 extensions, but that’s a different topic because it can be any kind of digital goods, but we’re talking the same language and I think we can accomplish that and announce this.

Karim Marucchi:
Okay, so for the audience I’ll ask you, can you give me a bullet point list real quick of what you think you’ll be able to announce as complete?

Benni Mack:
Well, the things that are complete, obviously in order to make this happen is tempo3.org is a fair repository, a fair compatible repository and it’s fed with all extensions that typo three has ever published. So I think it’s 8,000 something 8,700. That’s the second bullet point. And number three, typo three version 14 is going to be the feature freezes next week. So we’re just in time. Will talk to this federated system, federated repository natively out of the box and just take any extensions. So this would be my summary. And then of course on top we have a small but nice design update for this kind of stuff and we also have the Composer plugin, which I would consider experimental, but it’s on the way to move forward. And yeah, summarize, it’s more than we’ve ever expected to make happen. So it was really fast. It was clear, I mean, Brent knew all the details and yeah, we’re not building our own little house anymore. We’re talking about to the whole world.

Brent Toderash:
Yeah, and on the fair side, we’ll be able to browse TYPO3 packages at fair PM on the website and download them from there if you wanted to do something manually because they’ll all be indexed in Aspire Cloud, which will also have a new Aspire Cloud mirror running, running hosted in the EU in Germany as well as the one that’s hosted in North America in Canada. So we have, we’ll have two sort of global hosts mirroring, talking to each other. So we’ve been able to develop a kind of roadmap for making the entire system more robust.

Karim Marucchi:
So what I’m hearing is that while FAIR was created originally to solve a problem for WordPress, the open architecture that we tried to create has now led to very quickly in the next few weeks, as 14 comes out, TYPO3.14 Fair will be live across two different content management platforms. Yeah, so Benny, now that you’ve worked with it, now that you’ve seen it. Do you think that FAIR could be applied to any other content management systems?

Benni Mack:
Yeah, not just content management systems, but it should. And it’s not like PHP related or anything. Right? Because it’s a format, exchange format or how to hold these kinds of digital goods. So yes, I think more CMSS should adopt. It might be interesting to look into other platforms that might be, you know, that maybe are JavaScript based or something like that that could utilize FAIR as well and see where we get there. Because obviously it’s robust enough to work across the whole.

Brent Toderash:
But one of the things that I found really interesting about this project is a challenge that for Typo three you had actually two package distribution systems and you kind of had to choose one or the other for your TYPO3 install. Either you’re using the Classic mode or the Composer mode, and by introducing a third one we managed to bring them all together.

Karim Marucchi:
So, Brent, what I’m hearing also is that for instance, my team works with a lot of open source within ERP systems that isn’t necessarily content management systems. So the way the architecture is running now, we could actually start bringing in packages that actually didn’t have to do with WordPress or TYPO3 to support ERP customers and that ecosystem.

Brent Toderash:
Yeah, absolutely.

Karim Marucchi:
Great. All right, so with that being said, back to Bob. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.