We got it all working now.
It was a bit of a pain to find a workaround for the way you handle the main home/index page as sitting on top of everything else and not showing up in the menu - in the end we decided to duplicate it on level 1, this way, our previous structure works as we need it and we don't have to mess with all kinds of manual overwrites. For the user it doesn't matter...
Other than that we can already begin to transfer the content to the new system and should be up and running sometime next week.
One issue we hit was that our local Apache server was crashing from the moment we introduced the language.php (see below) - but only when running PHP 5.6, not with PHP 7. Any idea why that could be the case? We do all this because we need to move to PHP 7 anyway, but it would be good to know it's not something wrong with our code...
<?php defined('AUTOMAD') or die('Direct access not permitted!'); ?>
<@ if @{ %lang } = "de" @>
<@ set {
":title": @{ titleDeutsch },
":menu": @{ menuDeutsch },
":inhalt": @{ textDeutsch },
":gallery": @{ imagesDeutsch }
} @>
<@ else @>
<@ set {
":title": @{ titleEnglish },
":menu": @{ menuEnglish },
":inhalt": @{ textEnglish },
":gallery": @{ imagesEnglish }
} @>
<@ end @>
Cheers,
Tom