Breaking: #82445 - Pages and page translations

See forge#82445

Description

The database table pages_language_overlay has been obsoleted in the core and is not used and updated anymore. Page translation records are now handled in the "pages" table directly.

Impact

This change has a huge impact on page and page translation handling, especially on database record level:

  • Table "pages_language_overlay" is no longer read by core code

  • Records in "pages_language_overlay" are no longer updated by core code

  • Records in "pages_language_overlay" are no longer shown in the backend

  • Table and TCA definition for "pages_language_overlay" will be dropped in v10

  • Queries to table "pages" should now observe the "sys_language_uid" field to fetch default language records only. A casual case for this are tree traversal queries for children or rootline fetching. If additional restrictions are not added, the query result may return page translations along the default language row.

  • Existing inline relations with "foreign_table" and "foreign_field" and "foreign_table_field" on a "pages_language_overlay" TCA are migrated to "pages". This works well for typical FAL relations like the default "media" field.

  • Complex TCA relations with "inline" "group" that use an "MM" table in TCA not automatically get their relation record rows migrated. Configurations like these are seldom and need manual migration steps depending on their TCA configuration when upgrading.

Affected installations

Single language instances are not affected. For sites with translations and non-empty "pages_language_overlay" table, the main data merging is done with upgrade wizards, but it may happen that TypoScript and extensions may need adaptions, for instance if they write and read data from "pages" or "pages_language_overlay" directly.

Migration

The following backwards-compatibility are met until TYPO3 v10.0:

  • The TCA definition for "pages_language_overlay" is kept as part of handling extensions supporting v8 and v9

  • The database table "pages_language_overlay" is kept as is, but not updated anymore by core

  • A database field within "pages" is keeping the old pages_language_overlay record UID

  • An upgrade wizard merges records from "pages_language_overlay" into "pages"

  • An upgrade wizard adapts "be_groups" access restrictions for "pages_language_overlay" towards "pages"