Configurable footer components

[jorisvandenbossche]

Context

Currently our footer is quite minimal, and auto-populated with some Sphinx flags to show things like the copyright etc.
However, many sites use the footer to provide contextual information for readers that scroll to the bottom, things like social media links, site navigation, etc.

Proposal

Our footer should be composable with components, similarly to how our header navbar works. We could re-use some components from the header (e.g., icon-links) and potentially define a footer-specific component or two (e.g., column links that displayed vertically instead of horizontally).

Design inspiration

Name	Link
Material for MkDocs
Furo
Bokeh

edit: this was edited heavily by @choldgraf :-)

[tritas]

Thanks for opening the issue, I will take the time to put together something.

[12rambau]

Is the current implementation corresponding to what you were expecting in 2019 or is there still things to change ?

[choldgraf]

I think that the implementation of the footer still hasn't changed by too much...IMO there might still be some nice low-hanging fruit to improve there. (e.g., we could have a footer_start and footer_end configuration similar to what we have in the navbar, that could be populated with things like icon-links)

[datapythonista]

I think a big improvement that would be quite simple is to instead of having a copyright setting and render it with © Copyright at the beginning, to have a footer setting without extra content in the template. This would easily allow the current footers, and let anyone who doesn't want that copyright text to not have it.

If backward-compatibility is important, maybe a copyright_prepend = '© Copyright ' setting that can be overwritten, and used instead of the hardcoded text would be an improvement. Easier to users to change a setting than overwrite a template.

[12rambau]

solved in #1184 ?

[choldgraf]

Ah indeed I think so!

closed by #1184