The Cämp 2026: What's Really on the TYPO3 Community's Mind Right Now

Two days at The Cämp, three thoughts to take home

There are events where you drive home tired on Sunday evening and realize that the tiredness is the best part. The Cämp on May 9 and 10, 2026, was one of those. Two days of Barcamp on the SRH campus in Heidelberg, with seven concurrent sessions—from the lecture hall all the way down to the Salomon in the basement. Between sessions, people would step outside for a quick breath of fresh air and watch the ring-necked parakeets flying around the campus as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Anyone who wanted to could take a stroll through the old town; it’s close enough to walk there.

I had two sessions on the programme myself – one on SOLR v10 and one on the Cyber Resilience Act – and I also had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on TYPO3 upgrades using AI. I pitched my SOLR session with the line “I lost my heart in Heidelberg”, which is almost obligatory in that setting and got a few laughs. This mix of vector search, compliance and Schlager music actually sums up quite well where the TYPO3 community currently stands.

And these are the three things I’m taking with me.

The AI revolution has reached the engine room

Anyone who had a look at the session board would have found it hard to choose. Claude Code Skill for TYPO3, embeddings with Frank Berger, Martin Helmich’s Extension AI Generator, Web MCP on Sunday, AI-TYPO3 updates, and a roundtable on AI awareness and security. A year and a half ago, a single session like this would have been a keynote address to the group; now it’s just a cross-section. The people delivering these sessions are no longer building things out of curiosity. They’re building because they need it for client projects. A trending topic has become a workbench.

This became particularly clear during the discussion on AI-powered upgrades. For years, upgrade projects have been perhaps the most thankless part of our business: necessary, time-consuming, and rarely visible to the outside world. It is precisely in this area, where the least glamorous routine tasks pile up, that agents suddenly prove useful. Not as a replacement for developers, but as a foreman who prepares the first 90 per cent of a migration diff. No one in the group claimed that the agent would solve the problem; everyone discussed how to integrate it in such a way that it mitigates the problem. That is the right question. And it was typical of the whole AI strand, which was less about technology than about responsibility. Who owns the embedding? How does an agent relate to an editorial team? A community that asks such questions is not driven by the technology, but processes it.

Regulation as a space for innovation

My CRA session was the unexpectedly good part of my Saturday. Not because I said anything particularly new; we’ve already gone over most of it in the Open Website Alliance over the last few months. But because you could really feel in the room that perceptions are shifting. A year ago, people sat through such sessions with the attitude of “This will affect us somehow” – hopefully not too badly. This time, people sat there and asked specific questions. What needs to be in my extension? What does “Manufacturer” mean for my agency business? Vague concerns are turning into work that can be done.

As far as I’m concerned, the sessions on TYPO3 governance and the strategic concept are part of the same movement. A community that discusses its own structure whilst addressing regulatory requirements is more mature than one that merely produces code.

The format supports

One final thought. A Barcamp thrives on people getting up in the morning to lead a session, and on others choosing to listen. It’s a low-key form of community that only works as long as those involved take it seriously. At The Cämp, this was palpable, from the PowerPoint karaoke on Sunday morning right through to the closing session at three. Nobody had to explain the format; everyone just went along with it.

On the way home, I listened once more to the song I’d so thoughtlessly quoted that morning. You wouldn’t compose something like that today. And yet there’s something in it that endures: the idea that a place and an encounter can leave a lasting impression simply because you happened to be there on the right day. The issues are getting tougher, regulation more serious, technology faster. But the vessel in which the community discusses these matters holds firm. And in times like these, that is by no means a given.

See you next time :)

Any questions about TYPO3, AI or CRA? Let’s have a talk.