Local Footers in Sitefinity

The local footer is located right above the global footer, which is the same university wide. The local footer is customizable for site builders. It can consist of a parent breadcrumb, a physical address, social media icons, and up to four columns of helpful links for site visitors. This is an example of a local footer for the Office of Information Technology:

Local Footer Properties and Setup

Local footer properties are maintained in page properties and are inherited throughout the site. For this reason, each top-level page should have the appropriate local footer properties setup so that each child page can inherited those properties. This inheritance should remain consistent throughout the entire site but can be broken in special circumstances on by page level. When creating or editing a page, you can customize your local footer beginning with "Parent website breadcrumb" and ending with the selection of your site's columns. 

Parent website breadcrumb: Select the ultimate parent website that should be display in the footer here. Site builders can select parent breadcrumb here. For example, Department of Surgery might choose to have a breadcrumb link to the main School of Medicine homepage.  

Physical address: Site builders can select their address here and should submit a ticket if the information is not here or correct. This information is displayed in the local footer.

Social Media: Social media icons can be displayed in the local footer. This is a reusable content type and should only need to be created once. Site builders can create the content type in this area by hitting select and “Create a new item”. They can also create it in the content tab area on the dashboard. This content type can be maintained/edited in both places.

Local footer links (column footer links): Link groups are the reusable content type associated with the footer links. Link groups can be created in page properties as well as in the content tab on the dashboard in the same way as the social media icons. There can be up to four columns.

NOTE: Because this is a content type, you can select the groups (link groups) if you’ve already created them in the "Content" area. If you choose not to create link groups in the content area first, you can create them when you are setting up pages. This will allow you to create the groups only; site builders cannot add links here. This is more of a place holder. The groups created can be maintained and links can be added in the “Content” area in the dashboard. This is helpful if the site builder would like to setup their page footer properly but may be unsure of the specific links at that time. They can setup the appropriate groups and maintain the links in the dashboard without the added stress of going into individual pages to make changes once they have the links figured out

Creating Link Groups

Link groups are column that container helpful links that are located in the local footer area. Setting them up in the "Content" area allows you to not only create the link groups themselves, it also allows you to add the helpful links to those groups as well. Here’s how you create them:

1. Go to “Link Groups” in the Content tab on the dashboard.
2. Select the option to “Create a Link Group”.
3. Enter the office or unit name. Remember to number them if you will have multiple columns. For example: OIT wants to have 3 link columns total in their local footer. There should then be three link groups created, one for each column. The “office/unit name” for those groups might look like OIT 1, OIT 2, and OIT 3. These names are not public; they are intended to help site builders organize their columns.
4. Next, provide a section label. This is the public label that appear above the links in the local footer. Site visitors can see this label and it should be descriptive of the links in this group. For example: resources, services, etc.
5. Add a link if you want the label to be clickable and direct site visitors to an associated page.
6. If applicable, choose whether you would like that link to open in a new window or the same window.
7. Publish the group.
8. Once you see the group listed, click either the name of the group on the “Links” option to begin adding links to that group (column).
9. Click “Create a Link” and name the link as it will appear on the website and provide the link. This could be an internet page using the page selector or an external page by providing the URL.
10. Number the link to create a sort/display order and publish.
11. Repeat until you have all completed all your link groups.