Genesis Widgetized Footer

New Flexibility plus Enhanced Webmaster Experience

Changing the footer ‘Copyright/Credits’ & ‘Return to Top’ in Genesis is already easy with the use of Genesis Footer Shortcodes or some other plugins. However, it COULD still be much easier and more flexible with Widgets in WordPress! This plugin just achieves that, and at the same time keeping full Genesis Shortcodes support for the footer section! Yes, it’s that cool! 😉

You can use up to two widget Areas! Place one – full-width then – or two (one third/two thirds then) and get back the flexibility you’ve wanted for this area! Manage your copyright/credits stuff the way YOU want it, without messing up your ‘functions.php’ file… Just place in a text widget with copyright stuff, another one with logos and/or affiliate links, an additional search widget, recent posts widget, some explanation via text widget… You got it. The possibilities are endless. Finally.

A great helper tool for Genesis Child Themes!

Please note: The plugin requires the Genesis Theme Framework, a paid premium product released by StudioPress/ Copyblogger Media LLC (via studiopress.com).

Advantages

• Hugely improved webmaster/site owner experience! (Helps decrease the Mmh, how do I customize this footer thing…? experiences)
• Easily customizeable for any webmaster: Fully WordPress widget flexibility plus full Genesis Footer Shortcodes support!
• No more messing up with ‘functions.php’ file and forget the risk of breaking your child theme way too often…
• Developers: Hand this to your clients who want to customize their footer THEMSELVES, there’s no easier tool for that in Genesis!
• Included Disclaimer Widget Area for special disclaimer/imprint needs – fully optional, though!
• Works across Genesis child themes – so you can switch your “skin” but not loosing this tool 🙂
• Ideal for multilingual websites (for example with “WPML”): Much better handling of footer/disclaimer content for different languages. — See bottom of FAQ section here for more info on that.

General Features

• Small & lightweight plugin tool: Just activate plugin, place your widget(s) and you’re done!
• Replaces Genesis #footer content area with with up to two Widget areas (Sidebars)!
  • PLEASE NOTE: Not to be confused with the “Footer Widget Areas” which normally come in columns and belong to the #footer-widgets div container ID. This plugin here only changes the regular footer content within the #footer div container ID, the other ‘Footer Widgets #1 etc.’ keep untouched!
  • What that means: Manage your copyright and/or disclaimers also widget-based from now on – easy to use and to change! — Indepentendly from this, manage your other regular #footer-widget areas in your child theme (most come with these by default).
  • If you only place something into ONE footer widget area (no matter ‘Footer Area #1’ or ‘Footer Area #2’) it will be full-width!
  • If you place something into the two footer Widget areas TOGETHER they will change their width: ‘Footer Area #1’ is first from left and will have 33% width (one third), ‘Footer Area #2’ is second to left and will have 66% width (two-thirds). Both values and the float could be overridden via child theme stylesheet (using ‘!important’)
  • Adds a few CSS styles for this footer content area to properly divide widgets with some more space (all other styling is recommended via your child theme)
• Included is an additional Widget area called “Footer Disclaimer”, this is placed below the #footer div container ID and absolutely optional. Only if you place a widget in there it displays content!
  • Features full-width plus a real small font-size for disclaimer/ imprint purposes.
  • Included are 2 Shortcodes: one handy Shortcode for last updated date for your site; plus Shortcode to display any of the plugin’s 3 Widget areas (if active) into Shortcode-aware content areas.
  • Included helper function to place this at the very bottom (genesis_after hook) — See FAQ section here for more info on that.
• Child theme compatible: Out of the box it should work really fine with all official child themes by StudioPress pluss all Community/Marketplace child themes from studiopress.com
  • Includes support for both versions of “Prose” 1.0/1.5.x (has repositioned footer!)
  • Includes support for “Metro” 1.0 (has repositioned footer!)
  • Includes support for “Pretty Young Thing” 1.0/1.1 (has another footer function)
  • Includes support for “Modern Blogger” 1.0 (has another footer function)
  • Includes support for “AgentPress” 2.x and “RealPro” 1.0 – the plugin’s disclaimer widget degrades gracefully as “AgentPress” 2.x and RealPro 1.0 have built-in their own.
• Resonsive Design of child themes is supported (i.e. keeps untouched!).
• Landing Pages via page templates are supported since plugin version 1.2+, that means: ‘Footer Area #1’ or ‘Footer Area #2’ not there in the footer! (Custom disabling via constant is possible, see FAQ here!)
• Fully internationalized! Real-life tested and developed with international users in mind!
• Fully WPML compatible!
• Fully Multisite compatible, you can also network-enable it if ever needed (per site use is recommended).
• Tested with WordPress 3.3 branch versions and 3.4 branch versions – also in debug mode (no stuff there, ok? 🙂

Localization

• English (default) – always included
• German (de_DE) – always included
• .pot file (genesis-widgetized-footer.pot) for translators is also always included 🙂
• Easy plugin translation platform with GlotPress tool: Translate “Genesis Widgetized Footer”…
• Your translation? – Just send it in

A plugin from deckerweb.de and GenesisThemes

Feedback

• I am open for your suggestions and feedback – Thank you for using or trying out one of my plugins!
• Drop me a line @deckerweb on Twitter
• Follow me on my Facebook page
• Or follow me on +David Decker on Google Plus 😉

More

• Also see my other plugins or see my WordPress.org profile page
• Tip: GenesisFinder – Find then create. Your Genesis Framework Search Engine.
• Hey, come & join the Genesis Community on Google+ 🙂

Plugin Links

• Translations (GlotPress)
• User support forums
• Code snippets archive for customizing, GitHub Gist

Donate

Enjoy using Genesis Widgetized Footer? Please consider making a small donation to support the project’s continued development.

Translations

• English – default, always included
• German (de_DE): Deutsch – immer dabei! Download auch via deckerweb.de
• For custom and update-secure language files please upload them to /wp-content/languages/genesis-widgetized-footer/ (just create this folder) – This enables you to use fully custom translations that won’t be overridden on plugin updates. Also, complete custom English wording is possible with that as well, just use a language file like genesis-widgetized-footer-en_US.mo/.po to achieve that.

Easy plugin translation platform with GlotPress tool: Translate “Genesis Widgetized Footer”…

Note: All my plugins are internationalized/ translateable by default. This is very important for all users worldwide. So please contribute your language to the plugin to make it even more useful. For translating I recommend the awesome “Codestyling Localization” plugin and for validating the “Poedit Editor”, which works fine on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Idea Behind / Philosophy

For some client projects I had the request to build the footer stuff with widgets – additional to the optional footer widgets in #footer-widgets container. Better than to implement this in every child theme, I thought of making this into a plugin. So it can be used for almost all Genesis child themes. Once it was done, I also added a fully optional Disclaimer widget area so that it is possible to add more disclaimer/ legal/ imprint/ copyright stuff with a much smaller font presentation. Now, that’s a round thing and I hope it will help some users to better maintain their footer stuff ;-).

Credits

• Thanks to all users and supporters of the plugin!
• Thanks to all reviewers who actually used the plugin and then gave a good rating. I really appreciate that 🙂 THANK YOU!