Adding Footer To Concrete5 And Making It Editable

If you have a Concrete5 website installation, you might have noticed that you cannot edit the footer area at the bottom when you go into Edit mode on any page.  No back end method to change the content of that area either.  So, this article explains how to do it.

Please note that I do not get paid to write these articles. 

Quick Method

1. Access your hosting and/or website's file system (via FTP; webdisk; or File Manager tool of your hosting control panel, like cpanel).
   
   
2. Go into your theme folder.  For example, if your them was Greek Yogurt, then you would go to /Your-Home-Path/concrete/themes/greek_yogurt/
   
   
3. Go into the folder named elements, and make a copy of the footer.php file. This is done as a backup copy. Best to put in the copied file name a time stamp or indication of some kind that it is the original and when made (such as footer.php-Copy202008271153PDT-Original, which indicates year 2020, month of 08, and day of 27 and time and zone of PDT, and mention of it being the original file).
   
   
4. Edit the footer.php file via any text or code editor.  (Note if you got WHW1 hosting, then both File Manager and edit tools are all built into hosting control panel to directly edit on hosting file system) 
   
   
5. Replace this

   	
   	<div id="footer">
   	
   		<div id="footer-inner">
   		
   			<p class="footer-sign-in">
   			<?php  

   With this

   	
   	<div id="footer">
   
   <!-- 20200323-START-Tech Notes modify -->
   	<?php  
   	$a = new GlobalArea('Footer');
   	$a->display();
   	?>
   <!-- 20200323-END-Tech Notes modify -->
   
   		<div id="footer-inner">
   
   <!-- 20200323-START-Tech Notes modify -->
   		<?php
   		$a = new Area('Footer-Inner');
   		$a->display($c);
   		?>
   <!-- 20200323-END-Tech Notes modify -->
   
   			<p class="footer-sign-in">
   			<?php  

6.  Save the modified footer.php file back into the hosting (website) file system.

Better Method, But A Tiny Bit More Involved

To avoid losing your changes if you upgrade the theme you are using then you may want to do the following optional steps. A lot of people do not upgrade their theme, and so this is not a concern for them. 

Additional Steps

You will do the same as above, but first you will want to duplicate the theme in use.  In this example, the theme in use is Greet Yogurt, as mentioned above.

1. Copy the whole greek_yogurt folder from /Your-Home-Path/concrete/themes/greek_yogurt to /Your-Home-Path/themes/greek_yogurt/ .  This assumes your C5 site has been installed directly under your home path (often in the public_html or main or www folder, depending on your server's file system structure).  If your C5 installation is in a sub-folder, then you would simply have /Your-Home-Path/sub-folder/ as the starting point for your site's install.
   
   
2. Now instead of making the changes to the footer.php file in the original theme's folder, as indicated above, make the changes indicated above (simply go through the steps above) to the footer.php file in the copied theme's folder.  Any changes you do to the copied theme will act as an OVERRIDE.  Basically, the copied theme files will be used instead of the original installed theme files.

Advised Step To Take After Above Is Done

Once you have done the above or other changes it is advised you clear both your C5 cache and your Internet browser cache before refreshing or reloading the website page.  Read this on how to Clear the C5 cache.