When you try to write your own front end (FE) extensions with Typo3 there are common pitfalls. First of all be sure you enabled your table to hold the information. (Can be done very easy via the kickstarter). Next be sure you don’t query do much information of your table. All you need are the row where „sys_language_uid=0″. Your translation is made via the getRecordOverlay ! This short code snippet may help you to resolve your problems:

[sourcecode lang=“php“]
function readDBData( $table, $where )
{
$back = array();

if ( $where!=““ )
$where.= “ AND „;
$where .= “ deleted=0 AND hidden = 0 AND sys_language_uid=0″;

$res = $GLOBALS[‚TYPO3_DB‘]->exec_SELECTquery( ‚*‘, $table, $where );
while ($row = $GLOBALS[‚TYPO3_DB‘]->sql_fetch_assoc($res))
{
if ($GLOBALS[‚TSFE‘]->sys_language_content)
{
$OLmode = ($this->sys_language_mode == ’strict‘?’hideNonTranslated‘:“);
$row = $GLOBALS[‚TSFE‘]->sys_page->getRecordOverlay( $table, $row, $GLOBALS[‚TSFE‘]->sys_language_content, $OLmode);
}
$back[] = $row;
}

return $back;
}
[/sourcecode]

PS: Keep in mind this tip, too: Web List: ‚Localize-to-feature‘

When using RealURL in multi language environment sending an real 404 is sometimes not so easy. Some I just want to give you some hints:

First of all enable the pageNotFound_handling of Typo3.

• open the file typo3conf/localconf.php
• add these lines
  
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS["FE"]["pageNotFound_handling"] = 'http://www.my-domain.com/en/not-found.html';
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS["FE"]["pageNotFound_handling_statheader"] = 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found';


Now you need to check your RealURL config:

• Be sure you that you have not set postVarSet_failureMode OR set it to postVarSet_failureMode=''
• Also be sure you have defined 'noMatch'=>'bypass' for every single preVars section!

That’s all 🙂 Now you get the your wonderful 404 file not found page every time when a wrong page is hit.

If you like to use the link wizard to link to an internal or external url you may want to change the start tab. You can to this very easy. Just open the tca.php of your extension. Find the field you want to change and replace "script" => "browse_links.php?mode=wizard", with "script" => "browse_links.php?mode=wizard&act=page", to start with the internal link selector.

Using the the typoLink function in your own Typo3 extension is very simple. First you need an instance of the tslib_cObj object. Then setup the config array and call the method. That’s all.
To create the instance you need to include the object first:

include_once(PATH_site.'typo3/sysext/cms/tslib/class.tslib_content.php');

Then create the tslib_cObj:

$cObj=t3lib_div::makeInstance('tslib_cObj');

Setup the config array: (See the typoLink documentation of possible entries)

$conf = array( 'parameter' => 'http://www.bstar.de' );

Call the method:

echo $cObj->typoLink('bstar.de', $conf );

If you don’t want to setup the conf array and don’t need the power of typoLink you can use getTypoLink also:

echo $cObj->getTypoLink('bstar.de', 'http://www.bstar.de' );

Again I need to talk about the default section of the locallang.xml. When you are following the tip of my last post you may encounter an other problem. You don’t have a default anymore (yeah! I know I suggest to remove the default section). This is may a problem if you need to handle many languages and don’t had translate all of them right now.
So here comes my bad work-around.

1. open ../t3lib/class.t3lib_div.php in an editor
2. search for:
   $LOCAL_LANG['default'][$labelKey] = $csConvObj->utf8_decode($labelValue,'iso-8859-1');
3. replace 'iso-8859-1' with $origCharset
4. save the file
5. you may need to clear you llxml cache

Now you can use the default section again and UTF-8 characters are working fine.

Please keep in mind that you need to translate your SysFolder to use this feature!!!!!! Otherwise you need to go the hard way …