Forum PHP 2026: The French TYPO3 Committee Returns to Disneyland Paris

Forum PHP is the event for all PHP developers in France each year. It's organized by AFUP (Association française des utilisateurs de PHP, the French PHP users association), which is very active in the French PHP world. Around it, you find the PHP Foundation, Symfony, Laravel: all the big players.

It brings people together for two days of talks, workshops, and networking, mostly in French.

The TYPO3 French Committee used to organize a TYPO3 camp every year, but not enough agencies were taking part, and it became less and less interesting. We thought it would be much more interesting to represent TYPO3 at bigger events, so that's where our yearly budget goes now.

In 2024, we came to Forum PHP as attendees, just to see how the booths and sponsorships worked. In 2025, we were a sponsor for the first time, with our own booth. In France, TYPO3 is not the most used CMS, and it had a reputation as a very old and dying product. So our first mission was to say: TYPO3 is not dead. It worked. Each time people saw us, they said, “Oh, it still exists!”

It's always the same four of us who go: Alain Le Tanter, who leads the committee, Jonathan Iroulin, Grégory Duchesnes, and me.

This year, with the same sponsorship, we started showing the interface more. TYPO3 v14 is so interesting that we added a screen to the booth, with a video of the interface running all day long. We also showed the Visual Editor (visual_editor) extension, because it's really important for end users to see that TYPO3 is as simple as the other CMSs. Even if the attendees were mainly developers, the idea was to tell them: look, this CMS is as modern as the others.

On the second day, I gave my talk, Cyber Resilience Act : guide de survie pour devs PHP (Cyber Resilience Act: A Survival Guide for PHP Developers). I spoke as a compliance officer, and the main goal was to educate developers about this European regulation.

What I discovered is that most developers don't have a clue about it. At least in France, they don't talk about it at all. I don't know if it's the same in other European countries. Maybe some specific agencies have been working on it, but I think most will do what they did with GDPR: wait until it applies and react at the very last minute.

I was happy that the talk was quite appreciated. I think I had around 90 attendees. It's only in French, and a fellow committee member filmed it, so I'm still deciding what to do with the video.

This year was very complicated for Forum PHP. There were only around 500 attendees, a big loss compared to last year's 700 attendees. AFUP is an association, and its only income is its events. I think events all around the world are having a very hard time continuing with this business model.

So AFUP wrote an open letter for the survival of tech events in France. It asks companies to sponsor events, buy tickets for their teams, and join the associations behind them. More than 70 organizations have already signed, including the PHP Foundation, the Symfony community, and Drupal France. I proposed it to the TYPO3 Association Board, and the response was quick and very positive. TYPO3 will soon join the signatories.

Next year, Forum PHP will probably move. Disneyland Paris is great, but a little expensive, and maybe too big if fewer people attend. People now connect much more remotely, so AFUP is looking for other solutions.

Honestly, the mood was not great this year. It's a difficult time to find jobs, and not only because of AI, and this event is also where developers meet agencies and find jobs and missions. People were anxious, but the hope is still here. We all see that something is ending and something different is starting. The problem is that we don't know yet what, or where to position ourselves in this new world.

We couldn't ask the 200 who didn't come, so we asked the ones who did: why did you still come to this event? The answer was always the same. Most developers probably don't talk about their work at home or with their friends, so they feel a little lonely. This is where they find people like them. They also come to learn as much new technical stuff as possible in a minimum of time.

Of course, we had a lot of fun too. Some old friends who are no longer in the TYPO3 community are very involved in the PHP community, and we're always happy to meet them there.

For us, this was a very relevant event, and we'll keep taking part. Being there means talking with the key players of PHP in France. The TYPO3 brand should be everywhere. It matters in the French IT world.

Thank you to the AFUP team for Forum PHP 2026, and to Jonathan for the photos.