V4: Switching languages in Rainlab.Pages without the site picker

Questions
#1

Can someone please explain me why I can’t switch the editor-fields of Rainlab.Pages, repeaters etc anymore like on OCMS1 and OCMS2? This story popped up in v2 and it came back to the plugin.

it looks like since v3 it was removed completely.

Now in the latest blog-posts of 4.2 it’s written: "If you used October CMS v1 with the Translate plugin, you’ll remember the convenience of translating fields directly on the form. That workflow is back, and it’s built into the core. Any form field can now be marked as translatable. When it is, a globe icon appears next to the field label. Click it, pick a locale, and a popup opens where you can view and edit that locale’s translation right there on the page, without navigating away.

This works with every field type: text inputs, textareas, rich editors, repeaters, anything the Form widget can render. It’s compatible with both Multisite and RainLab.Translate, detecting which approach your model uses and handling the save logic accordingly. "

But it seems it doesn’t work with Rainlab.Pages. A provided “fix” was only to remove it from the plugin. OctoberCMS 4.2.5: Switching languages - Call to undefined method October\Rain\Halcyon\Builder::getKey() · Issue #541 · rainlab/pages-plugin · GitHub

The recommendation to use the site picker for switching the languages is a bad approach for Rainlab.Pages, when users with different languages are working together on the same instance because after using the site-picker in pages, the opened page-tabs will be closed and you have to find the related translated version of the page, which you are working on.

Our clients are working with german and polish users together on the same time on different websites, which are based on instances of v1 and v2, which I already migrated with their own themes and plugins to v4.2.10 but now I got stock based on this backend-barrier, which is really hard to explain to the clients. To let the clients stay on the old cms versions based on a outdated php-version is also not possible because the hosts removed the php-version already.

Can I do something from my side or is it just based on the outdated versions of Rainlab.Pages and Rainlab.Translate? Are the both plugins not more fully supported?

#2

I’d recommend having a bit of patience while we figure it out.

The trouble is, October CMS isn’t technically aware of the Pages plugin (this is by design), and all its features are introduced by extension only. So we need to find a way to get Pages to follow this methodology and add its own method for the Quick Translation logic by extension.

It is aware of Halycon models though (they belong to the Rain Library), so we may try this as a backup plan.

#3

Thanks for the detailed explanation.