TYPO3 Developer Days 2026: Prater Raines

Matt and Gary visit the Renault showroom on the Champs-Élysées.

For the third year running we returned to Karslruhe for the annual TYPO3 Developer Days. It's a full on three and a half days of technical and personal development talks, eating, drinking, and networking, with a couple of days tacked on either end in Paris and Strasbourg because that's where the TGV passes through on the way back to Britain and it seems a shame not to take advantage.

This year I visted the cinema and the sewer museum and the long queue for a table at Relais de l'Entrecôte where there's no menu, they scowl at anyone ordering "well done", and the steak comes in two portions so you don't have the hassle of watching your chips go cold. I learned to bake croissants and watched a cathedral change colour; we ate mussels, flammekueche and spring rolls, visited a car showroom, and walked like a hundred thousand steps. Gary does like to walk.

In Karlsruhe I managed another visit to the excellent outdoor pool, completed Pokémon Go's unexpected "explore 42 km" in the woods around the hotel, and made an emergency e-scoot to the optician when my glasses kind of fell to bits in the queue for dinner.

The whole event is hosted at a lovely* hotel where the breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner are excellent (if a little pork heavy) and which contains my all-time favourite manual juicer for my early morning orange juice. Although this year I have managed to nab a photo of said juicer only to find out it costs £300 plus delivery so I may be sticking to ready juiced oranges at home for a while. There's an on site 9 pin bowling alley where we placed sixth this year, and Gary tells me there is also a reasonably well appointed gym, whatever one of those is. The conference culminates with a Saturday night party which runs late into the morning, with currywurst, beer, and a very enthusiastic DJ.

* Now that we've found out you can book a room with air conditioning at a small extra cost.

Gary and Matt receive their lanyards at the start of TYPO3 Dev Days 2026. — Photo by Markus Luigs/TYPO3.

The two tracks and the campfire series of shorter uncurated talks had some excellent sessions on TYPO3 and other techs, with a strong focus on accessibility this year. Stand outs for me were Painting with the Web, which proposed replacing static design tools like Figma with fluid prototyping using HTML and modern CSS and left me with a very long reading list; The Cake is a Lie in the campfire track which was a very practical guide to improving login form accessibility; and Phirewall: Protection at the Application Layer, a very clear overview of the PSR-15 web application firewall and rate limiting tool.

TYPO3 v14 looks like a big step forward in backend usability and it was great to see this demoed at Real WYSIWYG Editing – Visual Editor for TYPO3, Level Up Your Superpower: The Next Generation of TYPO3, and Little Gems in TYPO3 v14. And Starting Today, I’m the Boss! presented the compelling argument that AI makes us all managers and nobody trained developers to be that.

I was disappointed to see the discontinuation of the TYPO3 Kudos Board and hope that returns, perhaps in a revised format, at future events. We'll be back in Karlsruhe on 5-7 August 2027 to find out, and if you can't wait that long the second TYPO3 Camp London is scheduled for 27-28 April 2027.

All Good Things Pt. 1 & 2 Tom Warwick & Kendall Litton	Round up of all the changes in TYPO3 since the last developer days in 2025. The project is now recognised as a Digital Public Good, a Symfony backer, and a PHP Foundation member. v14 includes the first ever built-in theme, a large number of backend improvements and inline WYSIWYG editing.
Level Up Your Superpower: The Next Generation of TYPO3 Oli Bartsch	In depth look at v14's changes, including backend themes, menu name changes, and big improvements to workspace editing, translation, bookmark management, and backend search.
Little Gems in TYPO3 v14 Jigal van Hemert	So many smaller changes that Jigal ran out of time, but highlights include restricting which content can appear in a given content area and document type, autocomplete for BASH and Fish, template syntax checking, shareable backend links, better content previews and Fluid error handling. And I learned about slide mode for the first time.
NFRs From Day One Achim Mustroph & Jan Suchandt	How to bake in non-functional requirements such as accessibility, performance, and security from day one, instead of leaving them to only be noticed when something goes wrong.
Starting Today, I’m the Boss! Florian Franke & Fabian Stein	10 boss skills you need to manage AI agents, including effective delegation, prompt writing, and testing.
Real WYSIWYG Editing – Visual Editor for TYPO3 Matthias Vogel	Demonstration of the excellent new inline editor extension for editing existing content visually and with drag and drop.
The cake is a lie. And so is your login's accessibility. Ramona Schwering	Covered permanent, temporary, and situational disability and why improving accessibility helps all users, then dived into a badly formatted login screen and a live demo of fixing the accessibility issues.
Speccing Out Teamwork Stiven Llupa	How to structure teams and testing to best cover real world use cases and reduce tension during code review, and how conventional commit messages can help generate automated change logs.
Same Content, Different CMS — Who Does It Better? Susanne Moog	Compared the same editing tasks in TYPO3, Strapi, Pimcore, Storyblok, and Payload.
Painting With the Web Matthias Ott	Moving away from the idea of a fixed canvas (or two: desktop and mobile) for web design and towards fluid typography, prototyping with HTML and CSS, and a constant conversation of experimentation and improvement.
Automated Testing for Content Elements Daniel Gohlke	How a small agency can perform frontend and backend rendering testing of their content library.
Content Editing Unlocked Ondrej Chrastina	Finding a balance between keeping control with developers and designers and providing power to editors using custom CKEditor components and styles.
A Web for Everyone: Why Accessibility Is Not an Edge Case Kai Grosz	Accessibility guidelines and testing approaches. Made the point that semantic HTML is also better for search and AI bots. In particular this was the first time I heard of the show accessibility tree option in Chrome DevTools.
Phirewall: Protection at the Application Layer Sascha Egerer	Unlike a traditional Web Application Firewall such as modsecurity, Phirewall works with any PSR-15 framework and is plarform aware. You can trigger bans from within your code, for example to block IPs after login failures. It looked like a great tool for adding rate limiting to APIs too.
Code Is Never Neutral Antonia Fedder	Looked at bias and how the people who produce software do not well reflect the people who consume it.