Fallback for translations

[ursbraem]

Let's say a news channel is available in 3 languages.

• Some fields are untranslateable (like date or category), some are translateable (like title and text).
• Some entries are translated fully (German, French, Italian), some just in 2 languages (German, French) and most are just in 1 language.

We can deactivate translations:

Then the entry will just show up on the german site.

But what if you want the german text to show up on the french site too? That is a super frequent use case for swiss sites in our case.

The solution would be a fallback logic. The editor can tell the cms "use the german version for italian too, but keep french for french".

In the GUI, this could look like this:

A much more simpler version would be to hard override all versions of the content with just one:

but that is a bit of an aberration.

---

Any thoughts on this use case? Suggestions on how to solve DIY or even better with existing mechanisms?
Anyone think this would be useful too?

[brandonkelly]

You could do an ad hoc version of this yourself by adding a “Use German content” Lightswitch field to your field layout.

Then from your template, you could swap out the entry with the German one when the field is enabled.

{% if entry.useGermanContent and entry.site.handle != 'de' %}
  {% set entry = entry.localized.site('de').one() ?? entry %}
{% endif %}

[ursbraem]

Thank you @brandonkelly ! That sounds very straightforward.
How do we edit the craft search queries, so that the fallback content is also found?

[brandonkelly]

You could pull that off with a custom module that listens to the Element::EVENT_DEFINE_KEYWORDS event:

use craft\base\Element;
use craft\base\Event;
use craft\events\DefineAttributeKeywordsEvent;

Event::on(Element::class, Element::EVENT_DEFINE_KEYWORDS, function(DefineAttributeKeywordsEvent $event) {
    /** @var Element $element */
    $element = $event->sender;

    if (empty($element->useGermanContent) || $element->site->handle === 'de') {
        return;
    }

    /** @var Element|null $localized */
    $localized = $element->getLocalized()->site('de')->one();

    if ($localized) {
        $event->keywords = $localized->getSearchKeywords($event->attribute);
    }
});

[ursbraem]

Thanks Brandon! I think we got it working.

[alexanderloewe]

That would be a very nice Extra to add into Craft CMS