Different footer text on each page

[unklee]

I don't know if this can be done, but it's worth asking.

I am converting an HTML site to a WP site. On my old site, I had a different, relevant quote in the footer on each page, and I'd like to carry that over to the WP site. There are several options that I have looked at but do not seem to be what I want:

1. Use a plugin (like Quote Master) to generate a random quote from a list - not bad, but not what I want.
2. Put a text widget in the footer - but this would put the same quote on every page.
3. Use Content Aware Sidebars (a pretty cool plugin) to put a different quote on every category - OK, but not individual enough.
4. Play with the PHP code the create many different footers, and call a different one for each page - too complex.

What I'd like to do is have a plugin that creates a widget area in the footer and then puts a blank box on the Edit page that allows individual text to be entered for that page.

Does that make sense? Does anyone know a plugin that does this? Thanks?

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/is-there/

[Victor Font]

You can do this with a custom field. Take a look at the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.

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Regards,

Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?

[unklee]

Thanks Victor, I'd never heard of that before, and I didn't know what to search for. It certainly looks like it would do what I want, though I wonder whether it would slow things down as it seems to do so much. Do you have any experience of that?

Reading up on ACF led me to several other plugins that may do something similar: Types, Pods, Custom Field Template and Custom Field Suite. So I will see if any of them are lighter.

Thanks for your help, I wouldn't have found any of them without your suggestion.

[WhiteleyDesigns]

ACF is the best available plugin for what you're trying to accomplish - Victor is 100% spot on. It will not slow your site in any way as all the plugin does is essentially create custom fields on the backend and write the data to your DB. On the front end, where load time is important, it is simply calling the custom field - just like if you were using get_post_meta() (which you can use with the plugin if you'd like instead of get_field or the_field) using a standard WordPress custom field.

Go with ACF - you won't be disappointed. I've built a lot of sites, mainly with Genesis and ACF is use in 100% of them.

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Matt Whiteley – WhiteleyDesigns, GitHub
Designing, Developing & Creating with WordPress

[unklee]

Hey thanks Matt, that's very helpful - I couldn't get more pertinent experience than that!

[Doug Edgington]

One possible option for displaying different text in the footer for different pages is the Widget Logic plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/widget-logic
You could drag text widgets into the footer widget area and control what widget displays on each page via conditional tags. It can become a cluttered mess if there are going to be a lot of required text widgets.
AFC is the way to go, but widget logic is an alternative if you aren't able to set up the necessary code to use AFC.

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Doug Edgington
http://www.dougedgington.com

[unklee]

Hi Doug, thanks for your thought, I'm learning all the time.

One of the problems with a complex thing like WordPress is not just that I don't know things, but I don't even know that some things exist. So I didn't know there were custom fields, so now I know I have to learn some more about them. I'm even wondering whether I can do my own coding and avoid using a whole plugin for one purpose - but then of course I may find other things I want to do with ACF too!

Widget Logic looks like an interesting plugin. I think my footer quote idea is too complex for this (I have over a hundred static pages) but it may be useful for other things. I use Content Aware Sidebars to create different widget areas on different pages, but this is another way to achieve that result that is worth looking into.

I appreciate all these ideas, for they give me things to check out. Thanks.

[unklee]

In the end, I went a different way. I used a hook to create a new file and then used the file and the Functions.php file to add a custom field just before the footer. See this thread for details - Custom field in footer. Thanks everyone for ideas.

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