TYPO3 - Extension tv2fluidge now with support for multilingual websites

For some month ago I published an article about the first version of my extension tv2fluidge, which helps migrating content of a TYPO3 website made with TemplaVoila to Fluidtemplate and GridElements. The first version of tv2fluidge still had some open issues, which I resolved in the meantime.

First of all, I raised the version compatibility level to TYPO3 6.1, since I used the extension to successfully migrated a TYPO3 6.1 website made with TemplaVoila. Also I found some small bugs, which also have been fixed. The last big task was the migration of a multilingual website made with TemplaVoila.

So I started to migrate  a multilingual TYPO3 4.7 website made with TemplaVoila to Fluidtemplate and Grid Elements. After I had processed all 3 migration steps with the webiste, I was a little bit disappointed. The FCE and content migration for the default language worked as expected, but translated content element were not in the right order and the migrated GridElements were messed up when it comes to translated content in Grid Elements columns. Also I had some trouble with Grid Elements, where the original TemplaVoila FCE had the language set to "all languages", because the Grid Element columns in the TYPO3 backend showed all content elements for all languages mulitple times. After some research, I found out that those problems seem to be fixed in later versions of Grid Elements, but not in the version available for TYPO3 4.5 and 4.7.

Below is a screenshot of a TemplaVoila page with a Flexible content element and translated page content.

Original page and Flexible Content Element

Atfer the migration, the resulting page and grid element looked like shown on the next screenshot.

Page and Grid Element after migration

As you can see, the Grid Element with the language set to "all languages" shows content for all languages. Also the sorting of the translated content elements is'nt correct when you compare it with the original conent elements for the default language.

So in order to migrate my multilingual TYPO3 websites made with TYPO3 4.7 I had to find a solution how to automatically migrate and reassign child content elements for Grid Elements with has "all languages" configured. Also I had to find a way how to fix the sorting of translated content elements.

Handling Grid Elements with language set to "all languages"

I came to the decission, that it would be best to have an individual translated Grid Element for each page language. Having this, I could reassign all translated child content elements to the individual translated Grid Elements.

The updated version of tv2fluidge contains a conversion utility to handle exactly this situation. It searches all Grid Elements, where the language ist set to "all languages" and then clones those Grid Elements to the amount of translations for each individual page. Then it reassigns all child content elements to the desired columns of the translated Grid Elements so you end up with a clean translated content structure in the TYPO3 page module.

Page view, where the Grid Element has been cloned to each individual language and translated content elements reassigned

The list module for this page shows how the Grid Element and the content elements are associated.

Listview for the page with the Grid Element

After conversion, there is ony one thing you have to do manually. If the original Flexible Content Element had FlexForm settings (e.g. input-fields or images), you must manually migrate the content and reconfigure the Grid Element as described in the extension manual.

Fix the sorting of translated content elements

In order to get the correct sorting of translated content elements I have created a module for tv2fluidge, which fixes the sorting for all translated content elements by setting the database field "sorting" to the sorting of the original content element multiplied with the uid of the language of the translated content element.

After processing all pages with the new "Fix sorting" module in tv2fluidge the sorting of the translated content elements finally looked good.

Page view with fixed sorting

The new version of tv2fluidge is available on TER and GitHub and I already used it to migrate Websites made with TYPO3 4.5 LTS, TYPO3 4.7 and TYPO3 6.1. As the long awaited TYPO3 6.2 LTS has been released last week, I can start planning the first migration projects (TYPO3 4.5 with TemplaVoila-> migrate to FluidTemplate and Grid Elements -> migrate to TYPO3 6.2 LTS). Now I just have to wait until the major extensions have raised compatibility to TYPO3 6.2 LTS.