In 2015 the teams of TYPO3 Neos and TYPO3 CMS developers confirmed that they were going their separate ways. The official reason: two products with major differences emerged from the long and tedious development period. The different ideas on what constitutes a CMS were a reason for the separation as well as the various system demands. This consequently resulted in different target groups: while the TYPO3 CMS developers prefer the classic separation of the back end and front end, Neos targets an innovative concept that should facilitate the operation for the web editors. Both parties decided on the separation so as not to hinder the development of the new system. Since the TYPO3 Association has been working exclusively on the development of the original TYPO3 CMS since then, it means that the Neos team is now on its own and no longer supports the developer network. The Neos developers gave notice of the following general product changes after the split:
- The open source CMS experiences an additional change of name as the prefix TYPO3 is completely deleted and only the name Neos remains
- gets its own project website: neos.io
- switchover to the developer platform GitHub
- switchover to MIT License
The biggest difference between Neos and TYPO3 CMS is the structure of the front end and back end. While TYPO3 CMS has the same classic, strict separation of both areas, Neos users view content directly in the front end, which is superimposed over the back end element. All changes are therefore visible straightaway, which basically makes the Neos operation more intuitive. Incorporating it into the modern content management system, however, should not be underestimated. In the Neos project, there is not the same known extension manager for integrating extensions as seen with TYPO3 CMS. These have to be installed in Neos with the help of a packet manager.