TYPO3 workspaces from chat: draft, review, publish, discard

TYPO3 workspaces keep a change as a draft until someone publishes it, and an AI assistant can use them from chat. Through MCP, the Model Context Protocol, your assistant writes a draft, lists what is waiting, shows it for review, publishes it or discards it. We ran that job on our demo install: two new headings drafted, one published, one dropped. AI Foundation, free and open source, provides the tools. Below are the prompts, what changed where, and what a workspace does not protect.

A workspace holds your change as a new version of the record, next to the live one. Your website keeps showing the live version. Publishing swaps the draft in; discarding drops it, and the live record stays as it was. The system extension is called workspaces and ships with TYPO3.

AI Foundation adds MCP tools for each step. The tools for pages and content accept a workspace, so one prompt can say as a draft. These tools did the work on our demo:

You need three things in place:

• The workspaces extension is active. AI Foundation relies on it, so it is already part of the TYPO3 MCP setup.
• A draft workspace exists. Create one in the backend if you have none. Live is workspace 0; draft workspaces start at 1. Our demo has one, called MCP Workspace for t3af-admin.
• You decide where the assistant writes. Either name the workspace in each prompt, or select a draft workspace in AI Foundation, MCP Server, so every write goes there by default.

For everyday use, give your assistant a backend user whose groups have access to a draft workspace only, not to Live. Its changes then wait there, and a person with publish rights releases them. On our demo the assistant worked as an administrator and named the workspace in each prompt, so you can see every step from one chat.

We ran the job on 5 October 2026 on the Warranty page of Mustermann Outdoor, a fictional brand on our demo install. Each prompt is in the words of the person who runs the site.

Draft. The assistant read the current headings first, then wrote both new ones into the draft workspace. It checked the live record afterwards: unchanged.

See what is waiting. The list showed two versions, each with the live record it belongs to and its stage. This is the list to read before anyone publishes.

Review. The assistant read each heading from Live and from the workspace and put old and new side by side. A reviewer sees the same in the backend, in the Publish module, which the workspaces extension adds: each draft, its stage and the difference. The stages, from Editing to Ready to publish, are set there.

Publish or discard. One prompt did both: the English draft went live, the German one was dropped. We opened the website afterwards. The English Warranty page showed the new heading, the German page the old one.

Put back. This was a demo, so we wrote the old English heading back on Live and checked the page again. On your site, a published change stays until you change it again. To take it back, ask the assistant to write the old value, which is why prompt 1 reads it first.

A workspace protects only what TYPO3 versions. Pages and content elements are held as drafts. Files, file metadata, redirects, scheduler tasks and cache clears act live, even when your assistant works in a workspace. So a prompt that renames a file or adds a redirect changes your site at once, whatever workspace you name.

Two more points stay with you:

• Publishing is a right. Whoever may publish, person or assistant, can put a draft live. Keep that right with people if you want every change reviewed.
• Some fields and tables need care. The MCP tools do not write relation fields such as categories, tags and media fields, in a workspace or on Live. Your own tables are within reach only after Discover Extension Tables has found them and you have enabled them.

The video for this episode runs the same five prompts in Claude on our demo install. It then shows the drafts in TYPO3's Publish module and the Warranty page before and after. Shown in Claude; other MCP assistants work too.

Every tool in this job is a core tool of AI Foundation, free and open source, no licence key, no registration. AI Assistant, AI Accessibility, AI Chatbot and AI Search add their own MCP tools and need their own licences. Together with AI Foundation they bring 100+ MCP tools.

What your assistant reads, it sends to its vendor, as with any chat.

The first post of this episode, TYPO3 MCP prompts, gives you ten starters that only read, and the Playground to try one tool by hand. Episode 3 brought everyday edits from chat; a draft workspace is the safe place to start them. Episode 4 asks your TYPO3 fifteen questions and checks your SEO by conversation. Next week, episode 6 clones a campaign page with all its subpages and puts fileadmin in order from chat.

The series comes from T3Planet by NITSAN Technologies, a TYPO3 Association Gold Member with more than 15 years of TYPO3 work. Jürgen, our AI Consultant for TYPO3, writes its episodes. Every episode runs its job on our demo install before it is published.

All episodes of MCP in Practice for TYPO3