Documentation

A page set is a group of pages, spread across different root pages, that represent the same content for different regions or languages. Every page in the set renders hreflang tags pointing at all the others—including each page’s own translations, which TYPO3 already handles.

For hreflang to be valid, all the tags of a set need to be present on every page within the set. That reciprocity is why a page belongs to at most one set.

Background on hreflang itself: Localized versions of your pages, Google Search Central.

Each root page may carry one or several languages. Not every root page has to be part of a set—you can have three root pages forming one set, two more forming another, and a handful that belong to none.

Three rules are validated, and the errors are shown against the root page they belong to:

1. An x-default is set. An empty value is rejected.
2. The x-default points at a page inside the set. A page outside the group is rejected.
3. Only one page per root page. A set cannot contain two pages from the same root page.

Not validated: that a page belongs to only one set. In practice this is kept by the selection wizard, which filters out pages already referenced elsewhere—but nothing checks it on save.

Saving a set that ends up with fewer than two referenced pages deletes the set, and the validation errors above are skipped in that case.

That is consistent—a set of one page has nothing to link to—but it is surprising if you did not expect it: removing the second-to-last page from a set does not leave you with a one-page set to fix, it leaves you with no set.

You flag a page, and the page you flag is a default-language page. A set stores default-language pages, so the flag can only ever resolve to the default language of the root page you picked—never to one of its translations.

This matters when the fallback is meant to be a different market. A company based in Germany that also runs a US site may want the German content as the fallback for the US set. Flagging the German page does that, and the x-default then points at the default language of the German root page. If that root’s default language is German, the fallback is German. There is no way to say "use the English translation of the German root as the x-default for the US set", even when that translation exists.

Usually the page you are editing is also its own x-default, and none of this comes up.

Where it does come up is the setup where the international version is not a site of its own but a translation inside a regional tree—an English version under the German root, serving every visitor no market matches. That English page cannot be made the x-default. The way to have it is to give it its own root page, which makes it a normal member of the set.

The event is not a way around this. The fallback is appended after every listener has run, from the flagged language’s entry in the finished map, so a listener that sets x-default itself is overwritten. What a listener can do is change where the flagged language points—and that moves the alternate tag for that language with it. There is no way today to point the fallback somewhere the set does not otherwise point.

For each page in the set the extension resolves the site, its languages, and the corresponding URLs, and emits one <link rel="alternate" hreflang="…"> per language and region combination.

Translations that are hidden, carry no_index, sit outside their start or end time, or whose language is not available in the frontend are skipped.

The resulting set of tags replaces the tags TYPO3 generated itself. If you need to change that output, use the event rather than a template override.

For the set shown throughout Editing—one page per market, with Germany carrying an English version and the United States a Spanish one—the head of every page in the set carries:

Every page of the set emits the same six tags, pointing at each other and at itself—that reciprocity is what makes the markup valid. The hosts and paths come from each site’s own configuration, so separate domains per market produce the same tags with different hosts. x-default is last, and repeats the URL of the version it was set on—here the English one, which is the sensible fallback when none of the language and region combinations match.