01 April 2012, 11:13

Hello

I am wanting to change the items in the footer menu.

I want to change "Contact Us" to "Help" and I want to change the link, "powered by Mahara" to my school logo and website.

I would like to add menu items as well.

In the menus area of site administration I can enable or disable footer links, but I can't change the name of the links and haven't been successful adding new ones.

I would appreciate help and advice.

Thanks
Sandy

01 April 2012, 17:27

Hi Sandy,

The footer menu is still very inflexible, so you can't add new links or change their names in the Admin area.

However, you can make the changes you want if you are willing to create a custom theme for your site, and override the footer.tpl file.  See https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Customising/Themes/1.2 for some still-relevant instructions on how to do that.  In your case, you want to replace the contents of the '<div id="footernav">...</div>' with your own footer menu, and change 'images/powered-by-mahara.png' to the name of your logo, which you should put in the htdocs/theme/<your theme name>/static/images folder.

You can also just edit the base 'raw' theme's footer.tpl directly (it's in htdocs/theme/raw/templates/footer.tpl).  However, if you do that, it's likely you'll inadvertantly overwrite your changes the next time you upgrade Mahara, unless you merge your changes back in after the upgrade.

R.

02 April 2012, 9:48

This was really helpful Richard. Thank you. It was easy to add a custom menu to the footer.tpl menu and turn off the footer menu items from within Mahara.

I had been trying to customize my site from the default template. I realized I could only customized the footer from the raw template.

But the raw template does not have colums at either end of the page. The side bars look nice in this Mahara instance - with the shading of blue to yellow. Can you give me advice on how to add side panels to the raw template?

Many thanks
Sandy

02 April 2012, 20:20

As I think it mentions on that wiki page, the other themes all inherit from the raw theme, and you can override any of the raw templates in another theme just by making a copy of the raw template and editing it.  So you could, for example, copy htdocs/theme/raw/templates/footer.tpl to htdocs/theme/default/templates/footer.tpl, and make your changes in default, if you prefer.

Even better is to create a custom theme with a new name by creating the file htdocs/theme/<themename>/themeconfig.php (make a copy of the themeconfig.php from default, and edit it appropriately).  Once you've done that, your custom theme will be available for selection in the site options area.

To create the side panels, you'd have to write some css.  You can override the main style.css file by creating htdocs/theme/<themename>/static/style/style.css.  I can't tell you exactly what to put in it, but the rules you like are probably somewhere in the stylesheets for this site, most likely in https://mahara.org/theme/mahara-org/static/style/style.css