Editing a Drupal footer

Question

I'm now maintaining a Drupal site that was built by someone else. I'm a total Drupal newb but have some coding experience. The site was last updated in 2011 and I have spent much of this evening, with some success, trying to edit the footer where it says "last update 2011" to "2014". I found a post here which directed me to some tpl.php files in the site's theme folder. There I found the hard-coded "2011" string in several different places (3 different files) and updated it.

Now on the website the new date string appears on every page except on the home page when I am not logged in as a user. That is, when I log in to edit the site in the normal way, then the home page displays my new "2014" string. When I log out and view the home page anonymously, then we're back to "2011". All other pages are good.

Can someone suggest a solution to this? Thanks in advance, David

Answer 1

You can use "Footer Message" module for Drupal 7. Try it, I hope it will help: https://drupal.org/project/footer_message

It's said that "A configurable footer message, editable from the site-information form and displayed as a block, as well as a theme variable available in page.tpl.php and hook_preprocess_page()."

In Drupal 6 it should be a block responsible for footer. Also if you are logged in as administrator see this menu : Site Configuration > Site Information > Footer Message. You should be able to edit footer from there.

Answer 2

It does depend on how the site was built so a few things to look at:

a) Blocks. Have you got different block configured for different users/pages? Generally this is best practice as it is easy updated in the CMS.

b) Theme template files. You said you found this hardcoded in a few places but have you checked the all templates in all the themes? Bad practice anyway.

c) Modules. Is there a specific footer module in use?

d) Theme settings. Unlikely but possible there could be a config string in the theme.info