Several brands, several languages
Rhine-Neckar is a region of corporations, mid-sized companies and universities, and therefore a region of complex websites. Several brands or locations under one roof are typical, along with international audiences and specialist departments that want to maintain their own areas.
Those three requirements together are the point at which simpler systems tip over and TYPO3 plays to its strengths: multi-site and multilingual support in the core, finely graded permissions per area of the site, and an editing interface that can be tailored per area.
What that means for the development
In projects like these the work sits less in the appearance than in the structure: which content do the brands share, and which not? Who is allowed to do what? How do languages and domains interlock?
We settle that before the first line of code and record it in the site configuration, versioned rather than in database records, so the decisions are still traceable in three years.
Accessibility for universities and public bodies
With universities, universities of applied sciences and municipal institutions, the region has many sites for which BITV 2.0 is binding. We implement accessibility in the sitepackage and train the editorial team, because the technical part only holds when the daily work plays along.
Configuration shared across several sites
Where several brands or locations live in one installation, the same configuration quickly ends up in five places. Change a shared foundation and you have to catch it up five times, and on the third somebody forgets.
Since TYPO3 v13 there are Site Sets for this: named configuration packages a site includes rather than copies. What is shared sits in one place, and departures stay visible as departures.
The conversion is not worth doing for its own sake. If an update or a relaunch is due anyway, that is the right moment, because the configuration is in motion then.
Two languages are not a special case
In a region with international corporations, English is rarely optional. The questions are then always the same: directory or separate domain, what happens to untranslated pages, who translates in what flow.
Those three decisions belong at the start, because every later change drags redirects behind it. We go through them one by one in the guide on multilingual sites, including the rule that gets broken most often: language links may only appear where the translation genuinely exists.