Custom Magento Theme – Part 3

Modifying the footer
In this part I will start the process of modifying the footer section, as shown below the original footer of the rwd theme and the outcome footer.

Within the rwd theme certain footer links are populated within the template structure itself, I aim to create these areas so they are manageable via the blocks section of the magento admin area. I plan to condense these into quick links, social media and contact information sections.

To make these changes I have copied the page.xml from the rwd theme folder and placed it within my own rwd-custom folder, like shown below.
app/design/frontend/{your-package-name}/{your-theme-name}/layout/page.xml

First step is to remove the quick links and account blocks

For this I removed the existing blocks related to the footer within the page.xml file (which I copied over from the rwd theme)

I removed the following

<block type="page/template_links" name="footer_links" as="footer_links" template="page/template/links.phtml">
      <action method="setTitle"><title>Quick Links</title></action>
</block>
                    
<block type="page/template_links" name="footer_links" as="footer_links" template="page/template/links.phtml">
      <action method="setTitle"><title>Account</title></action>
</block>

and added:

<block type="cms/block" name="footer_quick_links" as="footer_quick_links">
      <action method="setBlockId"><block_id>footer_quick_links</block_id></action>
</block>
                
<block type="cms/block" name="footer_social_links">
      <action method="setBlockId"><block_id>footer_social_links</block_id></action>
</block>
                
<block type="cms/block" name="footer_contact_info">
      <action method="setBlockId"><block_id>footer_contact_info</block_id></action>
</block>

Creating new Static Blocks

Then within the admin area CMS > Static Blocks and created the following static blocks

This allows me to managed the content within these blocks via the admin area.

Within these static blocks I can input any information I want to and they will be shown within the footer area.