The best way to edit your TYPO3's XLIFF files

Why t3ll is awesome #

Everybody who is working with TYPO3 as a developer or integrator will sooner or later be faced with the question, how to edit the locallang.xlf XLIFF files in the site package or extensions. The most people I met, started to edit them directly in text mode in their IDE which is not fun and can lead to errors and inconsistency like syntax errors, duplicated entries and missing or outdated <source> entries.

But there is one tool, everybody who has to edit XLIFF files should know: t3ll

Screenshot of three opened languages in t3ll

It can be used on any operating system, which supports the Chrome or Chromium browser. I use it on macOS and on Linux and there even is an .exe file for Windows. The tool can be found on https://github.com/garfieldius/t3ll/ where you also see the installation steps.

And it's built for TYPO3 and its localization file structure. Which means, all files are saved in the same directory and the translated files are prefixed with the target language - that's exactly the TYPO3 way of handling its locallang files.

Screenshot of file structure with multiple locallang files

How I use it #

The official documentation says, "t3ll is called from the command line". That's true, but I found it a bit unhandy to always remember or copy a file path, switch from my IDE to the command line and type the correct command.

But there are good news, if you use PhpStorm - it's called "External Tools" and is part of the context menu, when you right-click a file.

Screenshot of opened file context menu in PhpStorm

Enabling that feature in your PhpStorm is pretty easy:

Screenshot of opened PhpStorm settings