[TYPO3] TemplaVoila and .t3d files

[Jacob Hammeken]

Hi.

There seems to be a problem with importing .t3d files from Classic sites into
TemplaVoila sites. Everything works, except all content elements are non-used.
The pages are there, but the content is only visible in the non-used tab. The
import/export code seems to ignore whether a page was originally rendered with
another module, and thus, references are not created to the content elements.

During import, if the classic module was used for a page, but the page will be
rendered with TemplaVoila, it is probably preferable if one of the following
two things happens:

To make sure the user knows why it did not work as expected, so they do not
think something is improperly configured, they could be asked something like:
      Warning: this file is not compatible with your installation and
      may produce unexpected results.
      Do you want to import anyway?

Or they could be asked to map columns to fields. For each relevant
DataStructure, they would be shown a list of column names (NORMAL, LEFT,
RIGHT, etc.) and a selectorbox of field titles from the DS. Based on these
mappings, whenever the import code finds a page which was rendered with the
classic Page module, it could then create references on that page to its
elements (ordered by the sorting field). There are a few cases where elements
may end up in unexpected fields, for instance when a column maps to different
fields on different levels, but that is rare and can be fixed manually.

Since there can be both TemplaVoila and classic pages in the same database,
that information could be saved for each page in the .t3d file.  Where is the
.t3d format documented? Is it possible to determine which module was used to
render a particular page in a .t3d file? I imagine the import/export code is
not actually in the TemplaVoila extension, but somewhere else. Is it possible
to extend the import/export code, perhaps with a hook?

I would like to submit this as a bug, but I thought I would learn more about
the problem first. One of our customers discovered this, and I made a
temporary solution; a module which, after importing a .t3d, can be used to
append references to non-used content elements based on the sorting field and
column=>field mappings, like the second case above.

Regards,
Jacob