---
title: "Feature: Footer variants"
manual: "Frontend Theme for Extension Development"
version: "main"
source: "Changelog/2.0/Feature-FooterVariants.rst"
rendered: "2026-09-28T12:50:34+00:00"
---

# Feature: Footer variants {#feature-footer-variants}

## Description {#description}

The site footer comes in two arrangements, selected by the site setting
`theme.footer.variant`:

| Value | The footer is |
| --- | --- |
| `columns` | The four content columns above the meta row. **The default, and unchanged from before.** |
| `newsletter` | A newsletter band above those. |

Like the header variants, each is a Fluid partial of its own - below
`Resources/Private/Partials/Page/Footer/` \- and a modifier class, and
both share `Body.html`, which is the columns and the meta row.

### The newsletter band {#the-newsletter-band}

Three more settings, and the band needs all three:
`theme.footer.newsletterHeading`,
`theme.footer.newsletterPage` \- the page carrying the
subscription form - and `theme.footer.newsletterLabel`, the text
of the button leading to it. A fourth, `theme.footer.newsletterText`,
is one optional line under the heading.

**The band is a link, not a form.** A subscription form needs somewhere to
post to, and this theme has nowhere: it ships no controller, no storage and no
double opt-in, and every one of those is a requirement rather than a detail
for an address somebody types in. A field that looks like a subscription and
drops what is typed into it is worse than no field, so the band leads to the
page where the real form lives - whichever extension renders it there.

### Social icons in the footer {#social-icons-in-the-footer}

A row of platform logos is the content element `theme_sociallinks`
placed in one of the four footer columns - see
[Feature: Social link logos](Feature-SocialLinkLogos.html#feature-social-link-logos). The theme adds no footer slot of its own
for it, because a column already is one.

## Impact {#impact}

**A site that does not touch the setting is unaffected.** The default is
`columns`, its partial produces the footer that shipped before, and it
carries no modifier class.

A site package that overrode `Partials/Page/Footer.html` keeps working -
the file still exists and is still what the layout renders - but it now
contains the switch. The columns and the meta row moved to
`Partials/Page/Footer/Body.html`.

The styleguide section **Page chrome** shows both footers, the first
of them with a row of social links in its last column.