Manual:Footer/legacy

MediaWiki versions:
1.17 – 1.34

For MediaWiki > 1.35+ see Manual:Footer .

Add links to the footer edit

As of 1.17 and after you can modify the list of links in the footer using the SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec to modify the footerlinks arrays and setting new template keys for the values.

For example, putting this in your LocalSettings.php file will add a new "Terms of Use" link after the disclaimer link.

$wgHooks['SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec'][] = function( $sk, &$tpl ) {
	$tpl->set( 'termsofuse', $sk->footerLink( 'termsofuse', 'termsofusepage' ) );
    // or to add non-link text:
    $tpl->set( 'footertext', 'Text to show in footer' );
	$tpl->data['footerlinks']['places'][] = 'termsofuse';
	return true;
};

From there you can put "Terms of Use" in the page MediaWiki:Termsofuse on your wiki, for the link's text and in MediaWiki:Termsofusepage define the title of the page that you want the Terms of Use link to point to. Note, if you do not create these pages on your wiki, then nothing will appear in the footer.

  • It is possible to add more than one link. Just add a new call to the hook for each link required. Make sure that you change the identifiers for the function and the system messages when doing so.
  • If you are adding more than one link every link is placed in a new line within the footer. Thus you might want to adjust this for the links to appear in just one line by adding e.g. the following CSS to MediaWiki:Common.css:
li#footer-termsofuse {
    float: left;
    margin-right: 2em;
}

Another example, if you are writing an extension using MediaWiki 1.28 or later. (1) Add this to your extension.json:

	"Hooks": {
		"SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec": [
			"MyExtensionHooks::onSkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec"
		]
	},

(2) Add this to your MyExtension.hooks.php:

	public static function onSkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec(&$skin, &$template) {
		$template->set('FooLabel', $skin->footerLink('FooLabel', 'FooPage'));
		$template->data['footerlinks']['places'][] = 'FooLabel';
		return true;
	}

(3) Create three pages:

  • MediaWiki:FooLabel (contains text to display in footer, like 'Foo');
  • MediaWiki:FooPage (contains namespace:title of linked page, like 'Project:Foo');
  • Project:Foo (contains detailed page text).

Remember it may take a while to update due to MediaWiki caches. In case you are using Extension:MobileFrontend , which inserts a "Mobile view" link in the footer after the disclaimer link, the new footer links will come after the "Mobile view" link. To solve this, insert the above new footer links code before the code lines used to load the MobileFrontend extension.