Feature: #88137 - Multi-level fallback for content in frontend rendering

See forge#88137

Description

TYPO3's site handling was introduced in TYPO3 v9 and allows to define a "fallback type".

A fallback type allows to define the behavior of how pages and the content should be fetched from the database when rendering a page in the frontend.

The option strict only renders content which was explicitly translated or created in the defined language, and keeps the sorting behavior of the default language.

The option free does not consider the default language or its sorting, and only fetches directly content of the given language ID.

The option fallback allows to define a fallback chain of languages. If a certain page is not available in the given language, TYPO3 first checks the fallback chain if a page is available in one of the languages in the fallback chain.

A common scenario is this:

  • German (Austria) - Language = 2

  • German (Germany) - Language = 1

  • English (Default) - Language = 0

TYPO3 now can deal with the language chain in fallback mode not only for pages, but also for any kind of content.

Impact

When working in a scenario with fallback and multiple languages in the fallback chain, TYPO3 now checks for each content if the target language is available, and then checks for the same content if it is translated in the language of the fallback chain (example above in "German (Germany)"), before falling back to the default language - which was the behavior until now.

The language chain processing works with fallback mode (a.k.a. "overlays in mixed mode"), both in TypoScript and Extbase code. Under the hood, the method PageRepository->getLanguageOverlay() is responsible for the chaining.

Current limitations:

  • Content fallback only works in fallbackType=fallback

  • Content fallback always stops at the default language (as this was the previous behavior)