TYPO3’s Unique Structure and Global Expansion in Open Source CMS

Karim Marucchi:
Hello and welcome to Open Web Conversations on the Open Channels Network. Today I, Corinne Marucchi. I’m having a great conversation with my friend and colleague Daniel Fau. Daniel Fau is the CEO of the Typo 3 company which is a commercial arm of the Typo 3 open source CMS project. Daniel, welcome.

Daniel Fau:
Hi Karim. Thank you for having me waiting for this.

Karim Marucchi:
Thank you for joining us. I’m super excited. We’ve got a lot to talk about today. We’re going to talk about Typo three. We’re going to talk about Typo three coming to North America later this month. We’re going to Talk about version 14 and its launch, the Fair project and its collaboration with Typo3. There is so much. But let’s start at the beginning. A lot of open channel listeners may not be completely familiar with typo 3. Can you give us a sense of what is typo 3 as a CMS and give us a little bit of its history and where it sits in the ecosystem?

Daniel Fau:
Gladly. So where should we start? I think first with the name because everyone’s always asking why is it typo 3? Because typo, it’s a typo. That’s. It’s. It was created in Denmark by Kaspa Skahoy and the three after Typo. Basically it was the third iteration that he released. So the first stable product was the third version and we ever. We kept it forever. We will never change it. And if you ask us when is type of 4 coming out, we won’t answer. So that’s a long history and the almost unknown fact when you look at it from other open source projects, we are very old. Like we are 28 years old right now and that’s. Yeah, even in the CMS projects we are basically the dinosaurs.

Karim Marucchi:
28 years is a long time.

Daniel Fau:
I know, I know you’re just starting

Karim Marucchi:
to release version 14, which we’re going to get to soon, but as I said in the intro, typo 3 has a very unique structure and as I’m just new to the project and getting to learn it, I’m going to ask you to fill us in. Most open source projects have one type of structure or another. The typo 3 structure is very interesting. I learned about it by just saying, okay, I, being Italian, know what a GmbH is, but it gets sort of confusing for folks. So why don’t. Why don’t you give us an idea of how typo 3 is organized?

Daniel Fau:
I think for anyone listening, I think GmbH should be explained. It’s the German term for Gesellschaft Mitgeschrank der Haftung. It’s lovely to tell your children before they go to sleep. It’s one of the first words actual German children learn. Same as protosozalproduct. You will love it. So. But the structure, the tabati structure. So the GmbH came in at the last. So it is the last entity that was founded. Tabitha itself basically has its unique structure because of a selfless act. That selfless act basically was Casper Skahoy dropping out of the project and giving all the assets to the association, which is now in Switzerland. By assets I mean the brand, of course the code was publicly available to everyone. But everything that’s basically usually something that you keep close to yourself because you want to own it, he gave that away. And that’s now owned by the Type 3 Association. So we’re not having governance issues in distributing the brand, all of this. And we’re basically all community owned. So we do have over 1,100 members. These can be individual members with a very affordable €10 membership a year. Up to companies that are still only paying a compel comparably small fee to a membership in the association because it should be a really, really open project where everyone can contribute, be it a single developer, just an editor, or a company that makes a living for multiple families out of it.

Karim Marucchi:
So you have an open source project sitting in a association that is owned by the members a hundred percent. Right. And the governance there is democratic.

Daniel Fau:
We elect a board. So we do have at minimum six board members. These are supervised by our business control committee. So that’s another four members. And they are basically redistributing and allocating the association’s funds to community projects, to our expansion committee, to the documentation. So we cover a lot of things for the whole community. A lot of travel, of course, that’s a big portion of the whole budget. And these board members, those six I talk about, so six to eight, basically right now we do have six because we just had elections. Two of them are in my supervisory board. And the type of the company is 100% owned company by the association. So in the end, basically if you get an association membership, you own parts of the company, basically. So of course you cannot sell your shares. But it’s really linear and governmental, like democratic all the way.

Karim Marucchi:
So the association is a membership association and those are the Owners and it gets its revenue from membership, I’m assuming. Okay. And then the association basically owns the commercial company also. Yes, that’s interesting. Tell us how that works.

Daniel Fau:
So we’ve actually been late to the party. So the company was founded in 2016 basically because as an open source project that wants to deliver some sort of stability and compliance. There is a point in time where you can no longer sustain any version that is out there. And type three has a history of supporting versions for a long, long time. And also the compatibility is very high. So you can find type of installations that are out there currently running on version 12, 13 or now 14 that started with version 4, basically, or 3. So these are still out there. Of course we had breaking changes, but we never had a version that was breaking everything. So you could migrate all the way up to version 14 and the company started basically just covering old, old versions with security patches. So that’s what we call extended long term support. You have three years of long term support by the community. And if they. Because as you know developers, they want to move on, they want to invent new stuff, innovate. And we took care about the remaining versions. Like you could get additional Support up to 4 years as a typo 3 partner and 3 years as everyone for your type of 3 integrations with which means you do have 7 years of stability if you want to plan for 7 years without upgrading. And that’s where the company was founded

Karim Marucchi:
and I think that’s where the acronym LTS comes in.

Daniel Fau:
LTS Long Term Support Version and ELTS Extended Long Term Support Version. We just love our complex names.

Karim Marucchi:
So first of all, why do you have these versions? You started talking about it, but please explain, because a lot of projects, especially open source CMSs, either they have an end of life or they’re backwards compatible forever. How did you handle this?

Daniel Fau:
So we do have an end of life for each version, but that end of life comes effectively after seven years. But the community only cares for three years of that. So we do have an 18 month release cycle, which means you do have two actively cared for versions out there by the community for three years and you can extend that with a type of lead company. And why is that so? Fairly simple. You don’t want to patch all of the old versions if you’re not getting paid for it. Open source basically is all the agencies are contributing. You do have spare time contributors, we almost have 250 of them. And you don’t want to care about all of that legacy stuff, but someone sometimes has to and as we do have a large market share in universities and public sector, that’s basically. They are basically asking for this. But that’s not really attractive for developers. Let’s say your job description is, look, you have to watch after that PHP project for seven years and it’s open source and you’re basically here to do what you love. That’s not really appealing.

Karim Marucchi:
So if I and or my organization want to look at typo three, we can get community support from 18 months to three years and then through the GmbH, we can get it up to seven, right?

Daniel Fau:
Correct. That’s it.

Karim Marucchi:
Okay, so GmbH provides support for end users, paid support for end users.

Daniel Fau:
Not really. So we are like. So we are basically the service provider of our agencies, and our agencies do the service to their clients. So we are not really in operational business. We can support it, we can help, we can leverage marketing, all of these things. But if we like, let’s say if you are as an agency using ELTS, you can buy that at the type 3 company, sell it to your client for that instance. You are basically caring for, and you are basically still charging your hours. We are not doing operational business. That’s not on our agenda. And we do have a contract with the community that will never do it.

Karim Marucchi:
So the commercial company, the GmbH, is there for agencies and to organize for agencies.

Daniel Fau:
Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
Oh, that’s an interesting model. Okay.

Daniel Fau:
And here’s the interesting part. Even if you’re a university, you can still become a member of the association. And of course you can buy your ELTS directly in our online shop. So it’s not an issue. You do not necessarily have to be an HVC.

Karim Marucchi:
Right, right. But it is an ecosystem for them to collaborate and to be able to get help commercially in dealing with end customers then.

Daniel Fau:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
I think I have a pretty good picture from that. Okay, well, we’ve talked about sort of the organization of the project. Tell me about typo three and version 14. What’s new, what’s exciting? Why should I or my organization consider it as a CMS?

Daniel Fau:
Okay. I just have to arrange how I’m framing it. We do have a nice release video for it that usually talks about all of the benefits and advantages for the editors.

Karim Marucchi:
And put that in the show notes.

Daniel Fau:
Yeah, okay, perfect. Thank you.

Karim Marucchi:
Give me your version for the executive listener who’s like, all right, get to the point. Why should I look at this?

Daniel Fau:
Yeah, so it’s basically. And we did a lot of. To the, to the UX backend. Because with Typo three, you should be able to care for a lot of content with a lot less resources than anywhere else. So that’s the main goal. So you can easily, as a single editor, manage multiple thousands of pages that are in a powerful backend. You can rearrange everything so it’s all under your control and that got a lot of refinement in the backend. So you now do have context editing, you do have wizards when setting up content. So all of the things where you usually could have a mistake in a data workflow. So that’s basically being cared for. And that’s what we focused on for version 14. And as you remember, you’ve been at the Piper 3 Conference 2025, we announced a lot of these changes, which is always something very ambitious for an open source project because if we are announcing it, our community has to care for it, which is sometimes hard to execute, but we delivered. So all of the things that we really focused on are now in version 14. And the additional aspect for title three basically is it’s still developer centric. So you do have the advantages for the editor and for the on premise hosting for your sovereignty and everything. But you can access all parts of the, of the software from a developer perspective and that makes it really enjoyable because you’re in control. And I think that’s the best advantage of Typo three. There’s nothing hidden, it’s all accessible. You can shape it however you want it and it’s still professionally supported.

Karim Marucchi:
Okay, so we’ve talked about sort of how the project is organized, we’ve talked about its, its history. But you and I are both on more of the business side of open source and CMS more than the engineering side. If we have a listener out there who’s used to using one of the other open source CMSs out there, what’s the business case? Why should I take a look at typo 3? Because frankly, it’s been seen for a long time as. Isn’t that that German CMS? It’s very popular in Germany, but I haven’t seen it a lot outside of Germany. Explain to me how I might be wrong.

Daniel Fau:
So interestingly, we published a case study a few days ago which states the case study, the case of the state of Quebec, that’s one of the largest Type III installations out there. I do not have the exact numbers, but it’s multiple thousands of pages. It’s really complex. So it’s not that German solution. But a lot of the system structure, the database structure, all of this is, I guess what you would call German engineering So for us it’s just the way to do it. I think we market it as German engineering, but that’s so if you want to look at it, that’s the reason why you should look at it. Everything is very well structured. We do have a good organization in the back end. You can access the rights granularly and you can really focus on who in my backend should see what. So we’re not storing all of it in a database field. It’s basically what we intended to do when we all started doing CMS’s. You want to separate content from design and that’s what we did.

Karim Marucchi:
so for listeners, full transparency. My agency, CRUD Favorite, has been getting to know and getting into typo 3 for the last year and a half. We are a partner of Typo3GmbH and we’re helping bring Typo3 back to North America in a big way by having your next large conference, your yearly conference here in the United States this year. Is that right?

Daniel Fau:
Sort of. So we’re having a Type of three summit. We had to call it another name because the Type three conference you usually have in Europe, that’s way bigger and of course you do have the established ecosystem. But the first steps, these are important because it’s about the conversation that we’re going to have. So it’s not that you put a person on stage, he’s giving a session and that’s it. It’s basically about having a session and afterwards reflecting what is it all about? How can we collaborate? What are your ideas? Because the market works differently. So that’s something we have to learn as well. We’ve been to the U.S. we had a conference years ago and there was a large North American community as well. But that community is, let’s say they just did something else. So they moved to another technology. Some just retired and that’s gotta be revived. Definitely.

Karim Marucchi:
I see. So forgive me, it’s not T3 con, it’s a summit. Yes, that makes sense. But I know that my technical team is excited because of, as you were saying earlier, how well the data is structured. I believe how it was explained to me was that if you have a large amount of data, if you have a large, very large website, typo 3 is definitely something that you should look at and put at the top of your list. And that’s very exciting for large organizations that have a lot to publish.

Daniel Fau:
And so I also do have a good example for this. The University of Vienna, for example. That instance alone has not a thousand pages, but a thousand websites or more than a thousand websites in it. So that’s all. That’s already a lot. You multiply pages and you can. I’m not sure how many languages they have, but typo 3 has multi language support in itself. So basically you have a thousand websites with 100 pages that all go by 50 languages. So that’s naturally in the system. And also interesting, even if you have language support for Arabic languages, we can flip the backend left to right, so that’s also in it. So that’s pretty interesting. If you want to collaborate with a lot of people that have a lot to say and you want to share content right to left.

Karim Marucchi:
Right? Yeah.

Daniel Fau:
Oh yeah. Right, yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
But yeah, so I’ve seen the interface and it is amazing to see native multi language and right to left being supported in the core of the project. It’s really done well. So let’s talk about this event though. What are your hopes and what are you looking to accomplish and when is it talk about it and where is it and what’s going to happen? Tell me all about this topic.

Daniel Fau:
It’s pretty soon. It’s on the 19th of May, 2026, so I think one week, no one and a half weeks from now. So it will be in Atlanta. So that should be the most accessible airport in North America. At least that’s what we hope for. And it should have been a bit later, but the FIFA World cup, let’s say, interfered with our plans so we moved a bit earlier so it will be in Atlanta. And what are our hopes? We do have that large agency network in, in Europe that makes money out of huge installations, boutique websites, basically using Typo 3 as an enterprise content hub on government level and everything. Even the, and that’s the German bias again. The German government itself uses it as base technology for their government site builders. So these are a lot of benefits. But in the U.S. i, I want to ins. I want to initiate that slow transition to a professional commercial ecosystem because you cannot rely on services and integration all of the time. You need to build products, you need to standardize, you need to get more efficient. And the things that we are aiming for is basically having a healthy setup for your agency and for your day to day work. So basically bringing TAP three to a wider audience on a product base, having that, let’s say, the heart of the project, those individual integrations still alive and basically growing and also caring for the big pile. That is what we call the enterprise compliance in Europe, compliance in the US So companies that are really depending on sustainable solutions, that have a good audit, a good track record, high security standards, all of these things. But you know, the American market, that’s basically where things are decided. It’s not about the technology anymore. It’s basically what can you promise? And how is it delivered?

Karim Marucchi:
Well, we’re going to put details in the show notes, but it’s May 19th in Atlanta and the venue you picked, I believe is the Georgia Aquarium.

Daniel Fau:
Yep.

Karim Marucchi:
So quite a swanky venue.

Daniel Fau:
That’s nice by accident, but we thought it was nice and it’s something special. So you get there, it’s not your everyday stage and crowd and audience. It’s something special, I think, and I think it sets the mood because we are in a cozy environment. It’s sort of calm, It’s a good start. And we will have some conversations and meals before and after.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, I’m going to ask to see if I can host a breakout session either in front of the Shark Tank or the Whale Tank. I haven’t decided yet.

Daniel Fau:
I’m so sorry to tell you that the Whale Tank is already taken. So we did not get the room next to the Whale Tank because that would have had a window, of course.

Karim Marucchi:
All right, so Shark Tank it is. All right. So I’m sure just like the rest of all the open source projects as well as every software package in the world right now, AI must be a big topic around typo 3.

Daniel Fau:
It is, but as we are structured differently, we’re hesitant on it. So we do have community solutions for this because the community basically pushes into each and in each direction. So they developed MCP integrations, all of these things, and we are slowly catching up to see which principle and approach is the right thing for the type of three core and can be maintained by the project. So, but naturally we’re, we’re the right, let’s say the right solution. Of course, everyone claims that we just don’t want to offer a chatbot that does your work. We want to.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, of course not.

Daniel Fau:
Yeah, but so the, the way how Title 3 structured, even using workspaces, we are basically head into an approach where you can have your agents working in the, in the system itself and you can still do the content audit, still edit your content without relying on everything. It should be basically leveraging the human accountability responsibility.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, so not to give away too much from some of the sessions that are going to be in Atlanta, but I’m going to give you the other side of the coin because in the enterprise agency world, I can tell you right now, a lot of the conversations are around not only why should I choose a platform rather than start from scratch with today’s tools, but also where’s the leverage in the platform and in speaking to the technical team at typo 3. When I was in Germany just over a month ago, almost two months ago now, I learned a lot about the thinking around where they want to go and whether today we’re calling it MCPS or tomorrow we’re going to call it something else. The bottom line is having that open connectivity. I think the team’s already bought into this concept of being open so that as you said, the community can very quickly come up with their own solutions that aren’t verticalized. You need complete access to the system in that way. I think you’re actually not late to the party. I think you are quite literally ahead of some of the other ones. So many other projects have raced into verticalizing a chat window and verticalizing. Look, I can do X having this open idea where you want to make it as open as possible for people to use typo 3 as a foundation. I can’t wait to hear more in Atlanta. I know we’ve got a couple of people who are going to talk about that, but I’m really curious to understand and I guess we’ll see when we get there, what is the future of bringing together customer AI needs and where AI is going with a solid foundation of a solid CMS. You want to give us any hint or are you going to keep it close to the chest until the event?

Daniel Fau:
No. So we, we do have ideas for this, of course, and it will find its way into type of three course time after time. The. I think the most important thing is you have to understand how Typo three is approaching any solution. And it’s. We’re not selling technology because as you were right, you can just code a CMS or bytecode ACMS within hours. So it’s not that complicated anymore. I think the things we worried the most is basically, are you still in control of your content? Do you still know what’s on there? Who’s basically liable in the end? Whose responsibility was it in the first place and will it be in the end? So it’s basically about how can you give people that need to put their name under it the possibility to care for what they are responsible for? And that’s, I think that’s the most important part. So it’s about being compliant at least in the eu, not being liable in the US probably. And basically, yeah, bringing that to life and let’s say doing, doing the right thing the right way. I’ve just, I just don’t know how to phrase it because just using tackle, you couldn’t do a lot of things the wrong way. And then you have to circle back and we just don’t want to. Want to break too much while moving to the right, direct to the right place. I think that frames it pretty good. I know it’s abstract, but yeah, that makes sense.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, I guess you’re. You’ll share more from the content when it happens at the event.

Daniel Fau:
Yeah, absolutely.

Karim Marucchi:
All right. All right, so maybe you should go ahead.

Daniel Fau:
As we talk about the event, I think this puts one of the most important messages. We are bringing Benny Mac, who’s been the core team lead of typo three for the last 14 or 15 years. So he’s been doing it for a long time. He’s with us in Atlanta. So we are not just flying a bunch of marketing people over there. We’re basically always approachable for what you really care about, like the technology marketing as well, and also the business perspective.

Karim Marucchi:
Wonderful. Well, I had the chance to meet Benny Mac when I came out to Dusseldorf for T3con last year. And then it was my pleasure to collaborate with them at the CloudFest hackathon where a bunch of us worked on integrating a fair project. So that’s compatible with Typo three. What can you tell us about what happened there?

Daniel Fau:
I think we just met the proof of concept that the fair technology can be adopted, adapted by typo 3. So what Benny basically did and what he is doing right now, we will use the fair technology to distribute our Type 3 extensions. So we called in other projects. Those are called plugins for us. These are extensions and we need a way to distribute them in a. Let’s say in a. Also again in a compliant way. So you have to share your own repositories. That should be a possibility and there shouldn’t be a single point of failure in the whole structure. And FAIR really paved the way for this and the only purpose of the hackathon in at Cloud first was just proving if we can bring it into Typo three. And that sounds simple, but it’s. You saved a lot of work for us and we just could join the party and do all we could.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, I know they got, they got a. A solution code complete. Now it’s about the processes and the compliance and making sure that typo 3 can handle the surge of extensions, modules, plugins, whatever you want to call them, depending on your project that are coming out of everybody using these AI coding tools. It’s going to be interesting to see how the community reacts to folks saying that I have an idea for a module, an extension, a plugin. In other communities we’ve seen a real rush to publish anything and I think an interesting conversation over the next six months is how do we help end users and organizations understand what modules, extensions and plugins are good for a project? There’s a lot that’s going to change with what’s going on with AI, and I think it’s going to be very interesting to see, so I’m going to stay tuned for that. But it was very exciting to see how the Typo 3 team really engaged with the idea of how FAIR looks at security and making sure that you have a clear stream of ownership so that you don’t end up having the same types of problems that others have had around understanding where your plugins or extensions or modules are coming from. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of that. That was a lot of fun to work on for my part and others, and I’m really excited to see what’s going to happen later this month in Atlanta. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the Open channels community about typo 3?

Daniel Fau:
I think type 3’s perspective on the open source world itself, because I’ve talked to a lot of open source projects in the last few weeks. I know a lot of them are struggling because open source is basically also a danger if code is that accessible. Why should you support a community and open source project? But I think there’s a new responsibility that we should all take a look at and in the end take care of, which is someone has to audit whatever is out there and you have to, let’s say you have to set the pace. And even if an unlimited fast pace is possible, you wouldn’t want to have deployment cycles four times a year, six times a year. I know that is very appealing and it sounds like that is the perfect thing to do. But you have to have what we call the human in the loop in the end. So you have to get your teams on board, you have to provide a user interface, you have to know what’s happening so you’re not losing control over your tech. And I think that’s our perspective on the whole open source industry right now. It would be so easy to lose track and give us give up technology because it’s so easy to replace. And that’s something I just would not do because it wouldn’t even be sustainable. But we will have these sustainable conversations afterwards when it’s about how many tokens do you burn, how much data centers are necessary to run your wipe coding? Or is that maybe just a database that is solid and can be run on a small machine? So I think these are the conversations we will have in the future when we care about a planet again and society. So but that’s, I think that’s a typical open source topic.

Karim Marucchi:
Wonderful. Can’t wait to hear more.

Daniel Fau:
Yeah, we will have a lot of time in Atlanta. Join the conversation, I’d say.

Karim Marucchi:
Wonderful. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll put all the notes that we have from today’s talk in the show. Notes. And looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.

Daniel Fau:
Yep, I’m looking forward to this. I hope we have a safe trip. So. And you promised it’s not that hot in Atlanta at that time, right?

Karim Marucchi:
It’s not going to be that hot. It’s going to be. Just so you know, the temperature this week is about 80.

Daniel Fau:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
Fahrenheit. So about. What is that, 28, 29, something like that?

Daniel Fau:
To me that’s already hot. Maybe that’s also a reason why we chose the aquarium. So it feels like there’s some water and some cooling. There it is.

Karim Marucchi:
All right, take it ease. Thanks again.

Daniel Fau:
Thanks, you too. Thank you, Karim.