What Changes, What Endures: Notes From CMS Connect 2026

CMS Connect is a two-day conference in Montréal, Canada, organized by Janus Boye from Boye & Co. It is small on purpose. Janus knows how to get the right people together. I would say there were around 50 people from the industry: vendors, agency people, project managers, company owners, mostly from North America but some from further afield. The crowd was a mix of open-source and proprietary vendors, which was nice, because you rarely get to talk to them openly.

TYPO3 Developer Days took place at the same time, and I couldn't teleport, so I deliberately chose to attend this event. I wanted to look outside my own plate in Germany and beyond my horizon, ask questions, and get inspired.

It was great to catch up with Florian “Flix” Keitgen, and we spent some good time together during and around the conference days.

The event runs over two days, with a single track of 25-minute slots. The program is published about a week before the event. You never quite know what will happen until you are there, which keeps an element of surprise. It felt a little bit like summer school: intense, then a break, then intense again.

The first day opened with a bagel run through the neighborhood, then an opening presentation by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic called The Fly in AI. The parallel was that we as humans are overly optimistic about technology. It became the conference's running gag: every speaker after that worked in a Jeff Goldblum movie reference. Even me. If you need something to remember a conference by, a crowd adopting and synthesizing on something like that is what makes it outstanding.

The first afternoon had roundtables, with moderators on different tables and free choice of where to sit. I joined two: The New Agency Model, and AEO, GEO and SEO.

At the end of the first day there was a CMS Idol competition: six minutes in front of three judges. I presented an alternative search for TYPO3 that I have been working on, built on a demo site for an Italian restaurant in Munich, Germany, called La Bella Vista. (I even registered the domain.) You can query the website using a large language model, but without an extra database. I included a picture of Jeff Goldblum wearing a chef's hat. I didn’t win, but the vote was close. Sesimi won with a demo generating banners, social media ads, and video for a car dealer. It was impressive, and a reminder of how fast people are innovating right now.

On the second day, I gave my talk, What Changes, What Endures: Lessons From Three Decades of Open Source CMS. Afterward, one participant told me the context I gave caught him: not only the industry's changes, but the personal changes you see around you.

Feedback for speakers is collected in an interesting way. Attendees get a small A5 paper form for each talk, with standard questions and space for a remark. After the conference, the team scans everything and sends it to the speaker. As a speaker, it can be intimidating to know you will get direct feedback from people. It turns out people are nice, and the feedback I received was great.

The highlight of the conference came from Chuck Gahun, a Forrester analyst. His message was that CMS isn't dead; it's more necessary than ever. Many people in our industry have a kind of death wish about the category, and that can be contagious in our social media echo chambers. Chuck's position is that the CMS will be needed much more than before, but it has to change. Creating content is no longer the problem. Curating it is. So is proving provenance and giving it the right signals.

He argued content management needs two additional layers. First, a knowledge layer that describes content in a standardized way for agents and machines. Second, what he called a context graph: the circumstances around the content, because content changes after you publish it. Search a government site for “test,” and you may still get COVID content. Write about the royals in the UK, and at some point the queen becomes a king.

I think everybody in TYPO3 should have the privilege of coming to an event like this, because it opens minds. We have been uneasy regarding the shift toward AI inside our own community. I think we need to escape the nest we have built for ourselves over the last 15 years. The nest is comfortable. But sometimes flying is also good.

Another upcoming event from Boye & Co relevant for our community is the Open Source CMS 26 conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, on 20–21 October 2026.

Thanks to Janus Boye and the crew for the space, and to everyone who gave feedback on my talk. You can read a longer write-up about my presentation on Medium: Shift Happens: 7 Observations from the Perspective of the TYPO3 World.