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How do I place a link in a footer?

  • I will say before I start that I am completely new to ACF. I took over a website that seems to have used it extensively and I have no idea why that would be. There is nothing on the site that could not have been done very quickly without this plugin.

    I cannot disable ACF because it breaks the site. So I will need to work with it.

    As there are no traditional blocks to edit I cannot fathom how to place a simple centred link at the bottom of the footer. I can see the field group for company details which has been set to an options page but, although I can see fields I cannot see anywhere or any method of placing a simple link in the footer.

    Is there a simple way to add a link to the footer?

    Thanks

    Sasha

  • You need to look in the PHP templates of the theme. ACF fields are shown by code and you will generally not find anything in the admin that controls front end display. Try the file footer.php

  • Ahh, ok I had already looked in the footer.php but I didn’t really want to be editing core files. I thought the footer had been created with ACF, although I can’t see a sensible reason why that would be. It is certainly an odd choice.

    It is looking like I will need to find another solution to add this link.

    Going slightly off-topic for a moment. Do you know why deactivating ACF would break the whole site? If I deactivate the plugin I lose everything except a single bar across the top of the page. Everything else is blank white.

  • Template files are not core files. You likely have a custom theme built specifically to use ACF. The theme files likely have many calls to ACF functions. Deactivating ACF means these function do not exist. This is why the theme stops working due to calls to undefined functions. The only way to modify the theme is to modify the theme files.

  • Thanks, John. That cleared that one up for me. But what I meant was that I didn’t want to edit the core site/theme PHP files directly.

    I can’t imagine why anyone would build a theme using ACF. It seems like a very clunky way to build a theme, unless of course you know ACF like the back of your hand. I am wondering if it was done specifically that way in order to prevent the customer from using the theme for another site.

    Anyway, thanks for your help. You have given me some things to think about.

  • It is no different than building a custom theme any other way except that it uses ACF to create custom fields for use in the theme.

    There are many ways to build wordpress themes. At one time all themes were build by PHP developers hand coding files. ACF extends what can be done with only what is available in the WP admin.

    Generally when building a custom theme and using ACF there was some specific functionality that the client wanted that could be achieved with ACF that could not be achieved without ACF. The theme for your client was build specifically for them. There is nothing keeping them from using the same theme on another site but they are the only once that has access to that theme.

    There are likely thousands or even hundreds of thousands of developers that build custom themes using ACF. The free version of ACF is installed on more than 2 million websites and I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at the number of sites using ACF Pro.

    ACF is for developers that build themes using PHP code rather than a site or page builders.

  • Thanks again, John. The site is using ACF Pro and Elementor. The site can be edited with Elementor apart from the footer which for whatever reason does not exist anywhere other than as group fields in ACF and the footer.php file.

    I did get the link in the footer by editing the footer.php so, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

  • Well, with that information I have to say it is a little odd.

    You have a hybrid site. I also build sites that use Elementor and ACF but when using Elementor I do not work on PHP templates, or I do so rarely because we use Elementor Pro and build templates using its template builder. ACF fields are used in the Elenntor editor.

    If you the site does not include Elementor Pro then my guess would be that the developer or the client did not want to pay for it or the developer did not know how to use it, or it could even be that the site was built before there were header/footer template plugins available for Elementor, and that the developer custom built the footer, or it could be that elementor was added later.

    It’s always fun inheriting a site. I have several of those I work on that baffle me trying to figure out why the developer did what they did.

  • It is a bit of an odd one. The site was only built this year and it has both the free Elemntor and Pro versions installed.

    I have inherited three sites that are built in the same way, mostly with Elementor and then the footer is done with ACF Pro. I can see a couple of functions added to the WordPress editor that are very specific to each site so I guess that is where ACF comes into its own. But I cannot see why it would have been used for the footer.

    Anyway, thanks to your help I am a lot wiser now. It is really appreciated.

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