TYPO3 was conceived by Danish developer Kasper Skårhøj in 1997. The idea was to solve what had emerged as a problem for the young internet—as websites grew, the need to separate the management of design and content became apparent.
By August 2000, the core components were distributed to a development community that extended the concept and functionality of TYPO3 into the robust, and richly featured CMS that it is today.
TYPO3 now runs more than 500,000 websites worldwide and powers sites for many esteemed institutions, including Cisco Systems, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, and Harvard University.
In 1997, Kasper Skårhøj began developing TYPO3 from scratch. At the time, the term Content Management was still widely unheard of. Today there are many open source and proprietary CMS solutions on the market, but none come close to TYPO3 in terms of sheer functionality and maturity. After more than ten years of active, incremental development, TYPO3 is effectively feature-complete, making it an extremely compelling solution for web content management.
TYPO3 was founded on the belief that true open source, community-oriented development can make tools that surpass proprietary solutions. It is free and open to everyone, yet powerful enough for mission-critical commercial use. TYPO3 is an ever-expanding open source project that draws its strength from the imagination and ingenuity of those who use it. You do not have to pay a licensing fee for TYPO3 and you never will—leading to significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) in both the short and long-term.