Not a Technology Problem—A WordPress Agency Looks at TYPO3
What a 20-year WordPress veteran sees when he walks into the TYPO3 world for the first time—and what we, as long-time insiders, take for granted.
The inaugural TYPO3 Summit North America took place on 19 May 2026 at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. There were a lot of good talks that day, most of them—as you’d expect—from inside the TYPO3 community. The one I keep coming back to wasn’t.
It was given by Pat Ramsey, Director of Technology at Crowd Favorite, an enterprise WordPress agency in the United States. Pat has been building websites since 1995, working with WordPress since 2004, and co-founded the Austin WordPress meetup. When someone like that takes a talk slot titled “WordPress or TYPO3” at a TYPO3 conference, it’s worth listening—not for the comparison itself, but for what an experienced outsider sees about our platform that we, on the inside, have stopped noticing.
This is not a WordPress-bashing post. Pat didn’t bash WordPress, and we don’t intend to either. Different platforms solve different problems, and Pat’s perspective comes from years of working with enterprise organizations at scale. What follows is what he said in his talk and in the fireside chat that followed it (with Robert Jacoby, CXO at Blackbaud)—and a sentence or two from b13’s side of the table after each section.
“The Question Is Wrong”
Pat opened by pushing back on his own talk title. “‘WordPress or TYPO3’ is a little black and white, and also a much longer than fifteen-minute conversation.” For at least the last fifteen years, in his view, no single CMS has been the solution to anything—it’s been WordPress and something, Laravel and something. “Now the term is composable. It used to be integrated.”
So he reframed the session: if a customer or an organization is stuck in that either/or mode, what conversations should they actually be having?
b13 note
“Composable, integrated, baked in from the beginning” is roughly how we describe TYPO3’s core philosophy in our own work—we use the term core-near. It’s striking to hear the same argument made by someone walking in from the WordPress side rather than out from ours.
“It’s an Awareness Problem, Not a Technology Problem”
About forty minutes into the session came the line of the day: “WordPress largely has the market share here. It’s not a technology problem in my mind; it’s an awareness problem. And how do I bridge that awareness gap?”
The US enterprises that would love TYPO3, in his view, haven’t run into TYPO3 yet. They’ve run into the symptoms—licensing fees that jumped, SaaS services that got pulled out from under them, content models that buckled at scale—but they don’t yet have a name for the kind of platform that solves those problems.
b13 note
From inside the community, the temptation is to keep adding features and writing comparison sheets. Pat is telling us the bottleneck is upstream of that: the work isn’t to make TYPO3 better, it’s to make TYPO3 findable to the people whose problems it already solves.
Twenty Thousand Plugins Versus Four
The most visceral observation in Pat’s talk: “As a longtime WordPress user, I’m looking at the WordPress plugin ecosystem and the TYPO3 extension ecosystem and going—I like the TYPO3 extension ecosystem because instead of twenty thousand plugins to do something, I have four. And those four are there because they’re good and they work and they’ve been tested. It’s not just market share. It’s the quality game, and it’s the architecture game.”
He made it concrete with a real-world example: an organization running eighteen plugins in WordPress just to sell products, take payments, integrate with downstream systems, and send out transactional emails. His question was simple: why do you need eighteen plugins to do that?
b13 note
What Pat is seeing is real, but it’s worth being honest about why it’s real. The TER isn’t actively curated—anyone can publish to it, and only a small fraction of its ~5,500 extensions have ever been independently reviewed. What Pat is reacting to is closer to natural selection. TYPO3’s disciplined 18-month major release cycle forces extension maintainers to keep up; abandoned extensions fall out of practical use relatively quickly because they don’t work with current TYPO3 versions; and the smaller overall market never produced the 20,000-plugin sprawl WordPress has to begin with. The effect—a short list of healthy, current extensions—is real. The mechanism is the steady upgrade cadence underneath, not a curation board.
The Architecture Point: Two Tables Versus a Real Schema
In the fireside chat, Robert asked Pat what makes a WordPress-to-TYPO3 migration actually difficult. Pat didn’t hedge: “WordPress infamously has two tables that store ninety-nine percent of the content in your website. For simplicity’s sake, it’s beautiful. Once you start to scale, it’s a pain, and every engineer hates it. It’s called wp_post and wp_post_meta. You can define anything as a post…“
And, a few minutes later: “If I look at TYPO3’s architecture and I see that they didn’t cram everything into two database tables, I already have a better sense of trust that this is architected well. One hurdle is out of the way.”
This isn’t “WordPress is bad.” It’s: WordPress’s simplicity stops being simple at scale, and TYPO3’s structured, relational model is what holds up.
b13 note
This is the part of TYPO3 we most often forget to brag about. The TCA-driven, relational model is the reason TYPO3 manages multi-site, multi-language, deeply nested page trees with granular per-page permissions and doesn’t topple over. To us it’s “how TYPO3 works.” To Pat, after twenty years on a different architecture, it’s the reason to trust the platform.
Three Audiences, Three Different Conversations
The clearest piece of actionable advice in Pat’s talk: if you’re an agency or a solutions engineer trying to bring TYPO3 into an organization that doesn’t yet know it needs TYPO3, there are three groups of people you’ll be talking to, and each one needs a different conversation.
The organization that’s feeling the friction. They know something isn’t working—their content team is fighting their CMS, their stack is held together with eighteen plugins—but they don’t have a name for the alternative yet. Your job is to help them put a name on the pain.
The technical team that already knows. They’ve made the internal case. They need ammunition: forecasts, budgets, support-versus-expenditure math, migration phases, references. “Be their allies, make them the heroes, give them the ammo.”
The developers themselves, who have spent years inside one CMS and now face the learning curve of another. “Probably the hardest one to answer—it’s a training problem and it’s a time problem. You can’t compress time.”
b13 note
This three-audience framing isn’t theoretical. There’s a real path behind each one: official TYPO3 certifications and learning paths for the developers, references and case studies for the technical teams, consultative assessments for the organizations still in the “what is even wrong with our stack” phase. Pat’s framing maps directly onto work that already exists.
“Soften the Blow”—Augmentation, Not Rip-And-Replace
The other piece of advice Pat gave repeatedly, and one a lot of TYPO3 advocates need to hear: “The minute you start talking about replacing entire systems, people start freaking out—‘Oh no, we’re heading down. Oh my gosh, it’s going to cost a lot of money.’ Soften the blow. Start with augmentation, and then make that turn into migration over time.”
In the fireside chat, he made it concrete. If marketing is happy on WordPress, leave them there. Pull e-commerce into TYPO3. Pull international content into TYPO3. Glue the pieces together with APIs—he specifically mentioned WordPress plugins that consume a TYPO3 API, i.e. TYPO3 as a headless source feeding a WordPress front. The two systems coexist for as long as that’s the most sensible arrangement, and migration happens when it earns the right to.
b13 note
This matches our experience on enterprise projects: the healthiest migrations start as integrations, not replacements. Hearing it from someone coming from the WordPress side gives this stance a credibility it doesn’t always get when it comes from us.
What a Real Wordpress-To-TYPO3 Migration Looks Like
Pressed for specifics, Pat was unromantic and useful. A migration is an ETL job—extract, transform, load—because the two architectures aren’t equivalent. In practice it looks like a set of CLI commands that build the TYPO3 structures and import content in waves. AI is useful for prototyping migration scripts, but: “Always question what you get out of it. Throw it at a copy of something and see if it really works.” For orientation: 25,000 to 50,000 pieces of content is roughly a two-hour script run, after you’ve measured twice, tested, and measured again. On the same site, TYPO3 will likely outperform a comparable WordPress installation, because the queries land against a structured schema instead of a key-value sprawl.
Why He Thinks TYPO3’s North American Moment Is Real
Pat was careful not to over-claim. “Europe is not America. America is not Europe.” TYPO3 won’t repeat in the US what it has done in government and higher education across German-speaking Europe (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland)—not the same way, not in the same order. But: “We’re seeing the benefits of those decisions that were made years ago of how to structure it the right way. People are kind of looking up and going, ‘Wait a minute—I need my data stored somewhere that’s reliable.’ ‘Oh, I can’t put everything in this.’ ‘Those licensing fees just went up.’ ‘That service I depended on just got cut off overnight.’”
That’s the opening, in his view: not features, not benchmarks, but the moment American enterprises decide they want to own their own roadmap.
b13 note
What makes “I’ll own my own roadmap” actually credible, day to day, is a predictable platform underneath. TYPO3’s 18-month release cycle and the option of up to seven years of Extended Long-Term Support are the operational backbone that turns data sovereignty from a slogan into a procurement plan.
What We, as Insiders, Needed to Be Told
Three things stood out that we, as long-time TYPO3 people, had kept underrating until somebody from outside told us they mattered. The shape of our extension ecosystem—produced not by editorial curation but by a disciplined upgrade cycle and a modest market that quietly filters the field—is what lets an experienced engineer trust the four extensions they’ll actually use instead of evaluating four hundred. The fact that TYPO3 didn’t pour everything into a wp_post / wp_post_meta shape is itself a “buy” signal for architects deciding whether a platform will hold up at scale. And the honest answer to “WordPress or TYPO3?” for most US enterprises today isn’t “either / or”—it’s “WordPress and TYPO3, composed properly,” with a path that starts as augmentation and earns the right to become migration.
We’re grateful Pat made the trip to Atlanta to tell us that. The TYPO3 community in North America will be stronger if it stays open to people walking in from WordPress, Drupal, Laravel—anywhere. That’s how the awareness gap actually closes.
What does this mean for you?
If your stack is at the “WordPress and something“ stage Pat described, and you want a second opinion from people who’ve lived inside TYPO3 for a long time, get in touch. We’re happy to have the requirements conversation first.
