With TYPO3 v14, Camino introduces a default theme that removes friction from first installs. Why this matters—and how TYPO3 laid the groundwork.
Camino—The Need for a Default Theme in TYPO3 Is Real
It’s been years since Luisa Fassbender—Head of the TYPO3 Marketing Team—and I first talked about themes in TYPO3. Back then it felt more like a thought experiment than an actual roadmap item. With TYPO3 v14.1, it finally became real. Camino is here—proving that the discussion was worth having.
This is not a story about a fancy design. It’s a story about removing friction.
The Background
It’s 2026. Nobody seriously evaluates a CMS based on how many pre-built themes it ships with. That era is over. But what does matter—and Luisa and I agreed on this very early—is whether you can get a website on screen without being a PHP expert or knowing the TYPO3 internals by heart.
TYPO3 has always been extremely powerful, but that power came with a price: the first impression. Install TYPO3, open the frontend, see… nothing. Or worse, an error. That moment alone disqualifies TYPO3 for a lot of people before they even understand what it could do for them.
With the Product Strategy Group, I helped shape a roadmap around themes, and very quickly we ran into fundamental questions that had never really been answered before:
- Does a theme need to be a TYPO3 extension?
- Can themes be switched without rebuilding everything?
- How do common extensions like news or powermail integrate into a theme?
- Do we need a marketplace or “bazaar” for themes?
- And maybe the most important one: How do you customize a theme without forking it and blocking future updates?
That last question was a deal-breaker for me. I want to customize themes on a site level, not inside a sitepackage, and I want TYPO3 to run with a theme that doesn’t force me to ship PHP or glue code just to change colors or layouts.
The good news: over the last few major versions, TYPO3 quietly laid a lot of groundwork for exactly this.
Some examples:
- Since TYPO3 v13, site-specific customization can live in Site Settings or TypoScript files inside config/sites/my-site/.
- Site Sets introduced a modern way to configure websites without requiring coding skills.
- Content Blocks (v12/v13) pushed core thinking away from “everything is an extension” towards reusable components — very much in line with what Fluid Components introduced earlier.
- With the Resource API in TYPO3 v14, Helmut Hummel laid the foundation for handling assets outside the rigid corset of classic TYPO3 extensions.
None of these changes were “about themes” on their own. But together, they made something like Camino possible.
What’s Wrong With Existing Solutions?
Up until now, TYPO3’s answer to “I want to see something” was usually one of these:
- An error page
- The Introduction Package
- Or “just try this demo first”
Broad interviews run by Luisa and her team made one thing painfully clear: this first experience matters a lot. Installing a CMS and immediately feeling like you failed is not exactly motivating.
Yes, we built demo.typo3.org to showcase features without installation friction. That helps stakeholders and decision makers. But it doesn’t solve the actual problem: TYPO3 should feel successful right after installation.
The Introduction Package often comes up in this discussion, but it was never meant to be a real starting point. It’s a showcase. It demonstrates everything, not something you’d realistically use for a small website, your local church website, or your mother’s birthday page. On top of that, it’s an external dependency and always requires extra steps.
The participants of the TYPO3 SurfCamp 2024 experimented with TYPO3 Core to build themes and pointed out the problems to build an easy-to-setup distribution or theme.
Older approaches to themes in TYPO3 are, frankly, decades old. They never really gained adoption, and for good reasons. The current approach turns that on its head: Camino is built purely on Core APIs. No custom PHP logic, no magic. Apart from TCA, there’s basically no code involved.
What’s With Camino
Camino—shipped with TYPO3 v14—is not the final answer to theming in TYPO3. It’s the first serious step.
The brief was intentionally simple:
Create a modern, usable website design that works out-of-the-box, without external dependencies.
That’s it. No Content Types shipped with Fluid Styled Content. No multi-language features.
Camino is meant for simple websites. No pixel-perfect corporate CI. No endless configuration matrices. You install TYPO3, and you get a working frontend. You can switch the color scheme with a single toggle. You don’t need TypoScript knowledge. You don’t need a sitepackage.
Camino will ship with TYPO3 v14 and can be used for new projects in TYPO3 v14, but once TYPO3 v15 development is underway, it will move to GitHub and the TYPO3 Extension Repository. That’s a conscious decision. Camino is meant to be stable. If you build a site with it, it should keep working without surprises.
TYPO3 v15 will introduce a new default theme—for the websites you’ll build next year. Camino isn’t supposed to grow endlessly in features for Core. It’s a foundation, not the swiss-army-knife.
At the same time, Camino already proves its value today. It’s used for:
- Tutorials like “Get your TYPO3 website running in 3 minutes”
- Repetitive demo setups
- Showcasing custom plugins or extensions without visual noise
It’s intentionally boring—and that’s a compliment. It just works.
No external dependencies. No required TypoScript. Four color schemes. Clean structure. That’s it.
More advanced features—multilingual fallback strategies, complex detail views, extension-specific integrations—are not the goal of this theme. Those will come later, possibly in other themes, possibly with additional concepts like a mandatory manifest file once we move towards a real theme ecosystem.
Camino is literally just the beginning.
See Camino in Action
Thanks
This wouldn’t exist without a lot of people making Camino possible in the past months:
- Florian Keitgen & Laura Heine for the initial design and conceptual work
- David Steeb and Jasmina Ließmann for the main development
- The TYPO3 Core Team for polishing this part of TYPO3 v14
For me, this is one less structural problem to worry about. And that’s a pretty good feeling.