Why TYPO3 Needs a Marketplace for Products

Many of our product ideas start where agency work always starts: in client projects. A client has a concrete problem, we solve it, and after a while we realize the same needs exist in other organisations as well. That is usually the point where a project stops looking like a one-off solution and starts looking like something more reusable.

This is where product thinking becomes interesting. Not every good solution belongs in TYPO3 Core. Some ideas are too specific, some are too commercially oriented, and some are simply better developed with clear ownership, support, and iteration outside the Core process. In those cases, turning a recurring solution into a product is often the more practical path.

A lot of agency work is built around solving individual requirements. That is normal, and it is still a big part of what we do. But sometimes a requirement is not really individual at all. It only appears that way at first.

After the second or third similar project, patterns start to emerge. You notice that the same operational problem comes back in slightly different forms. At that point, rebuilding the solution from scratch each time stops being efficient. More importantly, it stops being necessary.

That is usually the moment when we ask a different question. Not just, “How do we solve this for this client?” but, “Is this actually a reusable answer to a recurring problem?”

When the answer is yes, a product becomes a sensible format. It gives the solution a clearer scope. It makes support and ongoing development easier. And it allows other agencies or clients to adopt it without having to reinvent the same thing again.

Our Managing Editor product came out of exactly that kind of observation.

In several projects, we saw the same structural problem: editorial leads needed access rights for their teams, but without full administrative rights. In practice, that often meant they had to ask an admin every time a new user account was needed. In one project alone, this led to 35 separate tickets in a single year, all asking a different version of the same question: “Can someone create a user for me?”

That is not just an inconvenience—it is a workflow issue that creates unnecessary friction over and over again.

The answer was not to process those requests faster. The answer was to remove the bottleneck. Managing Editor introduces a dedicated role that allows user management within clearly defined, non-administrative boundaries. It solved a real problem in one project, but it was also obvious very quickly that the same setup existed elsewhere.

That is exactly the kind of solution TYPO3 should make easier to find.

TYPO3 already has an extension repository, the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER), which plays an important role in its own right. But a repository is not the same thing as a marketplace.

While a repository tells you that something exists, a marketplace helps you understand whether something is actively maintained, commercially supported, and trustworthy in a professional context. Those are different questions, and for agencies and clients evaluating products, the latter matters far more.

Today, the TER contains extensions with very different levels of maturity, maintenance, support, and business context. That is perfectly normal in an open ecosystem, but it also means the TER is not the right place to create real market visibility for supported products such as Managing Editor, Descriptive Images, or Single Sign-On. 

If someone is looking for a solution for editorial workflows, accessibility support, or single sign-on, they are not really looking for a long archive of technically available extensions. They are looking for clarity. They want to know what the product does, who maintains it, how it is supported, and whether it is built for long-term use.

TYPO3 currently does not offer that in a structured way. 

Right now, agencies that develop commercial TYPO3 products have to do almost everything themselves. They have to explain the product, market it, build trust around it, define a support model, and handle the commercial side on their own.

That creates a lot of friction. It also means that discoverability depends too much on existing relationships. If you already know which agency built a product, you may find it. If you do not, chances are you will not.

A shared marketplace would improve that immediately. It would make products more visible and easier to compare. Agencies could present solutions in a more standardized environment, with clearer expectations around support, TYPO3 version compatibility, use case, and maintenance status. That would reduce overhead and make it easier to focus on the actual product instead of rebuilding the surrounding sales infrastructure every time.

This matters especially because most agencies are not trying to become software vendors in the classic sense. They are extending their service model with reusable solutions. A marketplace would support exactly that.

Clients benefit from a consistent and transparent structure, just as much as agencies do.

Most clients are not searching for TYPO3 technology in the abstract. They are looking for a solution to a concrete operational problem. They want to improve editorial processes, reduce manual overhead, add accessibility-related functionality, or introduce a more robust login setup. In that situation, it helps enormously if products are easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to compare.

At the moment, the commercial side is often fragmented. One product might be sold as a subscription that includes further development and updates. Another might be sold once for a specific TYPO3 version. Both models can make sense, but from the outside they are often hard to compare.

TYPO3 already has strong agencies, strong engineering, and plenty of reusable ideas coming out of real project work. What it lacks is a shared commercial surface where that strength becomes visible.

That is why this discussion matters beyond any one product. A marketplace would not just help individual agencies sell better. It would make the ecosystem itself easier to understand from the outside. It would show that TYPO3 is not only a platform for bespoke implementations, but also a platform on which focused, supported, commercially credible products can exist.

Other ecosystems recognised this potential early on, and there is every reason to believe that TYPO3 and other CMSs can benefit from it, too. This makes it all the more important to bring together this knowledge, these products and these approaches, rather than allowing them to remain scattered across individual agency websites and private conversations.

The products are already there. What TYPO3 needs now is a market to showcase them.