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Native Locales for TYPO3

Introduction

TYPO3 handles content in languages with "sys_languages", and since this concept is super-flexible (but also added on top of the website), you have a "default language" ("sys_language_uid=0"), which does not have any meaning defined in a central place.

TYPO3 v9 brought you Site Handling. This was designed to give a meaning to the "default language". Plus: You could have different default languages for multiple sites, and different languages.

Still there are hurdles:

  • Why do we need sys_language records anyways?
  • What should we do with "All Languages", another magic "-1" value?
  • The "fallback" logic to "default language" and the overlay logic blocks the decoupling of "content in a different language, which is not a translation"

This extension is built as a Proof-of-Concept to see what the future could look like with TYPO3 based on locales.

A new "locale" field

To finally decouple TYPO3 from the 20-year-old concept of "sys_language" record relations, a new field sys_locale is added to all TCA tables which ship with multi-language support.

This field is - for the time being - synchronized with sys_language_uid and the locale property from the site configuration, so it is auto-populated.

  • A signal adds sys_locale field to any TCA table.
  • A CLI command ensures integrity of the current state.
  • A DataHandler hook ensures that the sys_locale field is filled properly (also on update and when moving)

All entries with sys_language_uid=-1 are filled with the locale t3_all.

Install the extension via composer req

What's next?

  • Let's not use sys_language_uid=-1 anymore. Instead, we need some "l10n_state" magic to propagate a record without a locale
  • In the end, the "default language" could and should be seen not as the default language, but more like a "virtual node" where the localized records are connected to. It should still be used for linking.
  • See how we can resolve long-standing issues (selecting localized records in the backend, not being bound to default language in so many places).

Things to consider

  • Sorting: This is currently a mess with multi-language records (as the sorting is not partitioned)
  • Let's re-evaluate overlays + fallbacks again.

Credits

Benni Mack from b13.