The CMS is Dead – Long Live the CMS: The Neos Conference 2026 Recap - 2026 - Blog

AI has become both a source of excitement and anxiety. People see its potential to eliminate repetitive tasks, boost creativity, and unlock new opportunities, yet many also worry about losing control, relevance, or even their jobs. The challenge is no longer whether AI will change the way we work, but how quickly we can adapt to working alongside it.

This year's conference captured that sentiment perfectly in its AI-related sessions. It began with a keynote by Robert Lemke, who revisited the foundational principles of Neos in the age of AI: the sovereign web versus walled gardens, and the CMS as the "Single Source of Truth". Robert offered a thoughtful perspective on why these principles remain relevant as AI becomes increasingly integrated into our digital experiences. (You can read his reflections on the conference in his blog post.)

The conference concluded on an inspiring note with David Spiola's closing session on day two, "The CMS Is Dead – Long Live the CMS". David challenged the audience to rethink content management entirely within an AI-driven, highly integrated digital landscape and presented a compelling vision for its future.
The verdict of the week? The traditional CMS may be facing extinction, but Neos is proving that content management is far from dead. Through its innovative architecture, event sourcing, structured semantic content, API-first approach, and intuitive user experience, Neos is actively redefining what the next generation of content management systems can look like.

Robert Lemke at NeosCon 2026 — Robert Lemke presenting his Keynote on the future of CMS. Photo: Daniel Lienert

The Core Highlights & Technical Evolution

This year’s schedule was packed with sessions addressing frontend developer experience, APIs and structural paradigm shifts that answer how we will manage content in the future.

The Neos 9 UX Journey

Following the massive technological foundation laid down in Neos 9.0, Sebastian Helzle took the Center Stage to showcase how the editing experience has evolved since the Neos 9.0 release. The focus is clear: distraction-free, highly intuitive authoring. Sebastian walked the audience through the journey behind these UX improvements, demonstrating how agencies can leverage the new interface to show clients why upgrading to Neos 9 provides immediate efficiency gains editorial teams.

Beyond Fusion: Introducing CPX

One of the technical talks came from Marc Henry Schultz and Bernhard Schmitt, who showed the latest progress of CPX—a type-safe component language built entirely from scratch. Ten years after AFX and Fusion changed presentational components in Neos, CPX arrives as the next evolutionary step.

Why it matters: CPX transpiles directly into native PHP, achieving blistering rendering speeds, strict property definitions, and eliminating an extra runtime entirely. It allows developers to render a complete site without relying on traditional DSLs (Fusion, AFX, Eel, or FlowQuery).

Closing the Headless Gap: From Stripes to Types

For teams utilizing the "Neos Zebra" approach (bridging Neos with a Next.js frontend via a Content API), development has historically been a bit fragile because the frontend didn't natively understand Neos node types. Lorenz Ulrich provided a solution to this exact problem by demonstrating a new CLI generator. It automatically analyzes Neos node types and produces TypeScript interfaces, turning guesswork into type-safe, autocomplete-driven frontend bliss.

Sebastian Helzle on the Neos stage — Sebastian H. presenting the latest Neos 9 UX changes

Bernhard and Marc talking about CPX on the Neos tage — Bernhard and Marc talking about CPX

Lorenz Ulrich talked about the Neos Zebra approach

The Big Picture: AI, Security, and Quality Architecture

The conference also took a look at the broader landscape of web development and architectures:

AI is Eating Your CMS: Martin Helmich took a practical, hype-free look at how Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3 are approaching AI, contrast-testing it against what is truly useful in an editorial context.
Let Types Do the Testing: PHPStan creator Ondřej Mirtes delivered a session on leveraging modern PHP features (readonly properties, property hooks, enums) and static analysis to eliminate entire categories of bugs before a single unit test even runs.
Anti-Aging in Projects: Nicole Schneider shared strategies on how to combat gradual technical decay in long-running software systems, offering actionable guidelines for refactoring and maintaining high velocity over years of development.

Martin Helmich on the stage — Martin Helmich discussing AI in CMS

Ondřej Mirtes talked about eliminating bugs before even testing

Neos in Action: Enterprise Scale & Mission-Critical Use

A recurring theme this year was proving just how robust Neos is under pressure. A dedicated panel discussion hosted by Alexander Lehn brought together technical leads from corporates likeVogel Communications Group (managing over 40 multisites from a single Neos instance) and Cornelsen Verlag (delivering over 40,000 educational products) to discuss architectural choices, zero-downtime requirements, and scaling Neos to its limits.

Additionally, Martin Ficzel and Natalie Rosenkranz presented a masterclass case study on how Sitegeist consolidated 5 distinct hotel brands (30 hotels total) under the DSR.BrandHub into a single Neos frontend utilizing Figma design tokens and running on a scalable Kubernetes infrastructure via Flownative Beach—proving that multi-brand consistency and individual identity can coexist.

A panel discussion — The panel discussion about scaling Neos

Martin Ficzel and Natalie Rosenkranz on stage — Martin Ficzel and Natalie Rosenkranz presenting the case study

🏆 Celebrating Excellence: The Neos Awards 2026

The Neos Award ceremony is always a highlight of the Neos Conference, showcasing the creativity and engineering prowess of our agency ecosystem. A huge congratulations to all the nominees who presented their groundbreaking work on stage, including the teams behind Klosterfrau, BAG, Handtmann, pro.meister, Cornelsen, and Louis.

A heartfelt congratulations to this year's award winners:

Neos Gold Award: DSR HotelHolding | sitegeist media solutions GmbH
Neos Silver Award: Bundesamt für Gesundheit (BAG) | Jung von Matt TECH
Neos Bronze Award: Albert Handtmann Holding GmbH & Co. KG | contenance GmbH x netzwerk p
Dedication: Sevensite | Kaufmann Digital GmbH
Dedication: Isny Stadtmarketing (WAYS) | Format D GmbH
Dedication: Cornelsen Verlag GmbH | 3m5. Media GmbH
Community: Sandstorm Media GmbH

In a separate blog post soon to come, we'll be shining a spotlight on each winner and the amazing projects they built with Neos. Stay tuned — there's a lot of great work to share!

It’s All About the Community

What makes Neos Con truly special happens between the talks. It’s the long conversations over breakfast snacks, the vibrant discussions during the legendary lunch buffet at GenoHotel Karlsruhe, and the likewise legendary social event.

A massive thank you to everyone who attended this year’s Neos Conference and especially to all who stayed for the Contribution Day and the subsequent Neos Sprint (June 4–7)!

3 guys at the social event — 3 Sandstormies partying

People dancing at the social event — Dancing at the social event

Voices on Neos Conference

We’d like to share some personal thoughts and voices that we took straight from LinkedIn – let us know if you’d like to add yours!

„(…) Being here is, as always, a bit like a family gathering with old and new friends. Warm, open, honest. And there's something else in the air this year — a real sense that we have good foundations, that the talks here are showing how much progress has been made, and that we're allowed to trust we can be ahead again. I can't wait for what's next.“
Robert Lemke
Flownative GmbH / Neos Team

„Always great to have been part of #NeosCon. The #CMS is so much more than many people realize these days, and the #Neos community is vibrant and active, shaping the future of content. Many thanks to the organizers and everybody who was involved. It was a blast.“
David Spiola
capazunda GmbH / Neos Team

„(…) Once more, the focus of discussion this year was (not to anyone's surprise) AI; but I’ve felt the tone shift a bit. It’s less about specific features or things you can do with AI, but more on how agentic AI changes the CMS itself: what happens with content governance, publishing workflows and provenance when AI agents both consume and produce content within your CMS? There was a growing consensus that NEOS 9's event-sourced content repository positions the project uniquely well for exactly this shift— and could maybe also serve as a creative spark for other CMSes. 💡(…)“
Martin Helmich
Mittwald CM Service GmbH & Co. KG

„(…) It was fantastic to reconnect with familiar faces, meet new people, and spend time with friends I've known for many years. More than ever, this community feels like a family.(…) What I took away from this years conference is a strong conviction that the human factor matters more than ever: creating meaningful content, building great tools that empower people to create that content, and enabling collaboration that creates real synergy.(…) With Neos 9, we have a solid foundation for what's next – I see tremendous potential in this journey, and I'm excited to help shape that future together with this amazing community.“
Bastian Waidelich
Consultant / Neos Team

Neos Workshop & Contribution Day

This year, community members joined the Neos Workshop on May 31st to learn about how to implement various common requirements in Neos 9 and how to take advantage of the latest features in Neos 9.1 and upcoming features from Neos 9.2. Thank you for everyone who joined! Special thanks go to Bernhard Schmitt and Marc Henry Schulz for leading the workshop once again.

On June 3rd, 2026, the day after NeosCon, community members were invited to join the Neos team members at the contribution day. After a brief introduction, everyone talked about a Neos topic they would like to contribute to. Based on these topics, 5 groups were created with the best fitting team members as contribution guides. As every year, it was a fun & productive day, with many discussions and a bunch of new improvements for the next or existing Neos versions.

Neos contributors sitting at a table — Markus Günther helped the new contributors to get their setup ready and start their first tasks

Neos team members working with contributors on advanced features — Unfinished features from previous Neos sprints were also being worked on

Neos team members discussion — Neos Team members discussed new publishing workflow ideas

Post Neos Con Sprint

After the Contribution Day, a group of Neos Team members and community members joined a 4-day sprint at the punkt.de office in Karlsruhe to work on finishing the remaining features planned for Neos 9.2. Even though the energy slowly ran out, after so many days of talking and getting new ideas, the spirit of the conference helped like an energy drink. With great sponsored food and spontaneous Exit Game events in the evening, the attendees had a productive sprint. Neos 9.2 is knocking at the door with exiting changes.

Sprint attendees in front of the punkt.de office in Karlsruhe — The sprint attendees looking happy after a Currywurst lunch

Sprint attendants working together in a meeting room — Neos Team members and contributors working at the punkt.de office

See You Next Year!

We owe a debt of gratitude to our fantastic organizers Sandstorm Media and punkt.de, our incredible Platin, Gold and Silver sponsors, the speakers who shared their expertise so openly, and every single attendee who made the journey to Karlsruhe.

Did you miss a session or want to relive the moments? The video recordings of the Neos Conference 2026 are available on the Neos Con website.

Turn your ideas into code, stay type-safe, and we will see you at Neos Con 2027!