This Contao extension provides a basis for developers to implement methods that can get fallback articles when a page has no articles for a layout section.
qbus/contao-inherit-fallback-articles: Inherit articles from the next section up the page tree that does contain articles.qbus/contao-home-fallback-articles: Get articles from the appropriate layout section on the page tree's home page.
Fallback Articles provides the hook getFallbackArticles, language labels for implementations, and integration options in tl_layout.
The hook is called whenever a layout section does not contain any articles and a fallback method for that section is selected in the layout settings. The hook provides the page id and the name of the section. As a return value, it expects the fallback content as a string or false if no content could be provided by the fallback method.
Your hook listener must be named in order for it to be usable in the layout settings.
Register the hook:
// config/config.php
$GLOBALS['TL_HOOKS']['getFallbackArticles']['example_fallback_name'] = [
'ExampleHookClass',
'onGetFallbackArticles'
];
Implement your fallback method:
class ExampleHookClass
{
public function onGetFallbackArticles($pageId, $section)
{
return $this->exampleFallbackMethod($pageId, $section) ?? false;
}
protected function exampleFallbackMethod($pageId, $section): ?string
{
// do something, return string or null
}
}
Use the name of your hook implementation as a key to provide a short description of your fallback method under the language key fallback_articles_methods.
// languages/en/fallback_articles_methods.php
$GLOBALS['TL_LANG']['fallback_articles_methods']['example_fallback_name'] = 'Example description';
or
<!-- languages/en/fallback_articles_methods.xlf -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xliff version="1.1">
<file>
<body>
<trans-unit id="fallback_articles_methods.example_fallback_name">
<target>Example description</target>
</trans-unit>
</body>
</file>
</xliff>
Open the layout settings and select the checkbox "Define fallback articles". In the tabular field "Fallback articles", select the methods to be used per layout section. The methods are evaluated from bottom to top. The first one (from the bottom) to return any content "wins", i. e. the methods following it are not used. In other words, the fallback content in a section does not accumulate when multiple methods are defined.
Drop Contao 3.5 support and use the getArticles hook to get rid of the current replication of the core's module assembly.