Notes From Contao Summit 2026
On 15 October 2026, I gave a talk about AI and content management at the Contao Summit in Leipzig, Germany. I found a smaller CMS community that had reached some of my conclusions on its own, and was wrestling with a familiar question: who pays?
The Contao Summit is the official event for Contao, an open-source CMS. It's run by the Contao community with support from the Contao Association, and this year it changed its name from Contao Konferenz to Contao Summit. The format was two days and three tracks: talks and workshops on Thursday, then an agency track, an open space, and more sessions on Friday. The audience is developers, freelancers, and agencies, and most of the program is in German.
Contao targets a different segment than we do: smaller, entry-level sites where an easy, low-barrier editing experience matters most, similar to Kirby. Many agencies build with both Contao and TYPO3.
Most Content Never Starts in the CMS
I presented a talk that I've given a few times and keep evolving, AI Is Eating Your CMS. It looks at how different CMS projects integrate AI. Every CMS project is adding generative AI features to its backend, either directly in the core like Drupal, or, in TYPO3's case, through a whole host of extensions that add a “generate text from this prompt” button or similar features. I question that, because the general consensus seems to be that most content authoring doesn't happen inside the CMS anyway. People write in Google Docs and copy-paste into the CMS. Everyone I know works that way, including us at mittwald (an official TYPO3 partner). And ironically, even publishing on typo3.org works that way. If you're not creating content in the CMS, what do you need those features for? In my opinion, these generative backend features only add limited value.
The real value, I think, is in agentic AI. Instead of integrating AI features into your CMS, make your CMS accessible to AI as a user. Your CMS will have human users, but also agentic and machine users. That raises interesting questions. Do you even still need a backend? And if you do, what is it for, if editing is also done by AI?
I don't offer answers. I share my own thoughts, and people usually come to me afterwards to tell me either where I'm right or where I'm wrong. Both are interesting.
Contao Skips the AI Button
The Contao folks came to the same conclusion. They're not adding AI features to the CMS. Instead, they're adding MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and everything else you need to connect the CMS to your external AI agent, so the agent can operate the CMS. I was happy to hear that, because it played very well into the hypothesis of my talk.
Someone Always Paid the Tab
The Contao community faces a few challenges I see everywhere across open source. I was at one of their conferences in 2018, when they had 200 attendees. This year there were 60. Many TYPO3 camps have the same issue, and I think both DrupalCon and WordCamp are also seeing fewer numbers. This year, the organizers changed the concept, moving from selected talks in two tracks to a format with a barcamp-style open space and an agency track. That puts the hallway conversations at the center of the program and gives agencies, a big part of the audience, a place of their own. I liked the idea, though it’s probably too early to tell whether the new format will bear fruit.
At the conference, they announced that Contao will start a commercial version of its product, which they call the Professional Edition, to secure sustainable financing for the project and its developers. The Contao folks have been bogged down by security reports, which AI has made so much easier to produce, and working through them takes a whole lot of work. As I understand it, they hope the Professional Edition will let them fund developers to work on the product full-time.
TYPO3 has the same funding issue. We have a bigger community and bigger budgets, but in principle the problem is the same. Contao, Joomla, and others are struggling to finance themselves and exploring new ways to do it. The Friday open space even had a session on Contao financing, though I'd left by then.
One remark from DrupalCon Rotterdam stuck with me. Tiffany Farriss, interim CEO of the Drupal Association, said people think open source is free as in free beer. What they're now learning is that the beer was never free. Someone else was always paying the tab, and maybe now it's your turn. More and more communities are realizing that, one way or another.
Familiar Faces, Familiar Questions
Some things are the same in every community. There are people in the Contao community I've known for years, and just like at a TYPO3 conference, it's always nice to see them again.
If you want to see how a neighboring community is handling the same questions we are, AI and money especially, a small event like this is a good place to look. And I came away with my hypothesis in better shape than when I arrived.
