Footer with links

#Overview

This guide shows how to build a footer component containing images, components and relations.

It will allow you to create a footer that contains a one-liner message, a company contact link, an image, and multiple links to both internal and external resources, as well as to your company's socials.

Footer component with fields

#Prerequisites

• REQUIRED: You need to have a Hygraph account. If you don't have one, you can sign up here.
• REQUIRED: You need to have a Hygraph project.
  • OPTION 1: Create a project. This is the way to go if you want to follow the entire tutorial for learning purposes.
  • OPTION 2: Clone the basic project. If you're already familiar with Hygraph and only want to follow the parts of the tutorial where you create this footer, you can start here.
  • OPTION 3: Clone the entire cookbook. This is the way to go if you're curious about how the headers & footers are made but don't want to follow the step-by-step creation process. This project contains the entire Headers & footers Cookbook so you can compare them, or look into what instances they contain.
  • OPTION 4: Use an existing project of yours. If you have a project already and want to add this footer to it, this is the way to go. In this case, you may need to adjust parts of the tutorial to your own project schema.

#Core concepts

In this guide, you'll work with a number of schema elements. Let's look into them:

• Model: Your schema is the content structure of your project. You can define your schema by creating models and adding fields, reusable components, and sidebar widgets to them, as well as integrating remote sources and establishing relationships with other models.

• Enumerations: an enumeration is a predefined set of values that represents a list of possible options. You can use them to group values within a type.

• References: References are relations between two or more content entries in your project. With references, you can reuse content entries by connecting them. Once the relation is configured, you can also use it to create related content from the content creation screen.

• Component: a pre-defined set of fields that can be reused across models and content entries. You can think of a component as a flexible, reusable template: you define the fields that will be used inside a component once, and then fill them with different content every time you use it in a content entry.

• Basic component field: a component is a special field type in your Hygraph schema that defines which components of which type can be used in a model. Component fields can be of basic or modular types. A basic component field can only have one component attached to it. You can limit the number of component instances to one, or allow multiple component instances to be added in the content entry.

• Nested components: Nested components allow you to create component fields within a component, as if you had a parent component containing one or more child components.

#What you can do

This guide offers two paths:

• Path 1: Use this guide to create a footer component with links that you can use in your project.
• Path 2: Clone one of the projects we created for you. You can clone a project that only contains the basic models so you can work on the headers & footers right away, or you can clone the project that contains the entire Headers & footers cookbook to compare the different section configurations without having to clone multiple projects.

#Clone project

#Clone the basic project

We have prepared a project that contains all the base schema elements you need to create your headers & footers, in case you don't want to build them from scratch:

Clone this project

If you decide to clone this project, you can skip the base schema elements creation part of this tutorial, and start from this step.

#Clone the complete cookbook

We have prepared a project that contains the entire Headers & footers cookbook:

Clone this project

This cookbook contains all the recipes we have so far to create headers & footers, so you can compare the different field configurations without having to clone multiple projects.

To find this particular recipe in the cookbook project, navigate to the schema and look for the "Footer links" component.

#Step-by-step guide

In this guide, we will create a footer component with a nested component field for links. Before we can build our footer component, we need to create other schema elements that will be a part of it.

We will divide this process in steps to make it more manageable:

1. Create the referenced models: We will create 3 sample models - Author, Book, and Shop - to use in our internal links.
2. Create the navigation item component: We will build a navigation item component that we can nest into our footer component to add links.
3. Create the Socials model: We will create a model that will allow us to create content entries with links ot our social network accounts.
4. Create the footer component: We will create a footer component that you can later add as component field to your models.

#1. Create the basic models

For this example, we'll go with the idea of an online bookshop that has real world subsidiaries, so we'll create 3 models:

• Author
• Book
• Shop

#Author model

Author model

Let's start with the Author model. In the Schema builder, we'll click +Add next to Models, and use the following information:

We'll click Add model to save.

Our model has been created but it's empty. To create a simple model that will contain basic author information, we'll add the author name, bio, and image.

Let's start with the author name, as a Single line text field. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, and click Add on the field card to add it.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add a Rich text field, which will our author's bio. We'll select the Rich text field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add an Asset picker field, which will be our author's image. We'll select the Asset picker field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Now that we're done with our Author model, let's move on to the Book model.

#Book model

Book model

Our second model will be the Book model. In the Schema builder, we'll click +Add next to Models, and use the following information:

We'll click Add model to save.

Our model has been created but it's empty. To create a simple model that will contain basic book information, we'll add the book name, description, cover image, and a relation to the author.

Let's start with the book name, as a Single line text field. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, and click Add on the field card to add it.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add a Rich text field, which will our book description. We'll select the Rich text field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Now let's add an Asset picker field, which will be our book cover image. We'll select the Asset picker field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we want books and authors to be connected. A great way to do this is using a two-way reference in our Book model, that will create a relation with the Author model. This type of relation will also create a reverse field that we will later be able to see in our Author model, connecting back to our Book model.

We'll find the Reference field on the Add fields right sidebar, and click Add on the field card to add it.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Now that we're done with our Book model, let's move on to the Shop model.

#Shop model

Shop model

Our final model is the Shop model. In the Schema builder, we'll click +Add next to Models, and use the following information:

We'll click Add model to save.

Our model has been created but it's empty. To create a simple model that will contain basic shop information, we'll add the shop name, address, picture and location.

Let's start with the shop name, as a Single line text field. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, and click Add on the field card to add it.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add another Single line text field for the shop address.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add an Asset picker field, which will be our shop's image. We'll select the Asset picker field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add a location field so Editors can show the shop location on a map. We'll select the Location field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

We'll click Add to save.

Now that we're done with our three models, let's create our links component!

#2. Create the navigation item component

Create a navigation item component

We want our footer to contain a navigation item component that will allow us to add multiple links - both internal and external - to our footer. To build this, we'll click + Add next to Components and add it using this information:

We'll click Add component to save. It's time to start adding instances to this component.

First, we'll add a Single line text field from the Add fields right sidebar.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

We want our footer to offer the possibility to add both internal and external links. To do this, we'll add a reference for the internal links, and a slug field for the external ones. In this case, we won't be making them required fields, because users will either use one or the other.

We'll start with the reference field. We'll find the Reference field on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

We'll click Add to save. We've configured the reference in such a way that when we find this field in a content entry, it will allow us to select an entry from the models that we selected.

Next, we'll add a slug field for our external URLs, using the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we want to have a boolean field that we can then toggle to indicate if a link should open on a separate tab or not.

We'll add a boolean field using the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

#3. Create the Socials model

Socials model

We will create a Socials model that will allow us to create different social network content entries that we can later on add to our footer as relations.

In the Schema builder, we'll click +Add next to Models, and use the following information:

We'll click Add model to save, and start adding fields to this model.

We'll start with the social network name, as a Single line text field. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, and click Add on the field card to add it.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add a Slug field from the right sidebar, which will allow us to later on include URLs to link to our socials.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add an Asset picker field from the right sidebar, so we can include the social network icon as well.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save. We did not allow multiple values in this case, because we want to only be able to have one icon per social account.

Now that we have created all the schema elements that we needed for our footer, let's jump into the final step!

#4. Create the footer

Now that we have all the schema elements that, both directly and indirectly, will be a part of our final footer component, we'll go ahead and create it!

Footer component with fields

We'll click + Add next to Components and add it using this information:

We'll click Add component to save, and then we'll start adding instances to it.

We want our footer to start with a CTA for customers to contact us. It will contain a one-liner message, an image and a contact URL.

We'll start with the one liner message. Let's add a Single line text field, which will be our footer title. We'll add it by clicking Add on the Single line text field card on the right sidebar.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we want our footer CTA section to have an image in it, so we'll add an Asset picker field, using the following information:

We'll click Add to save. In this case we're not allowing multiple values because we only want to add one image to our footer. We are also not making it a required field, because we want this image to be optional.

Next, we'll add a Slug field from the right sidebar, which will allow us to later on include a contact URL.

We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

That was it for the CTA section of our footer. Next, we want to be able to add links, to both internal & external pages, and our socials.

Let's add the links first. We will add a basic component field to nest the navigation item component we created earlier into our footer component. We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save. In this case, we've allowed multiple values, because that way we can add as many links as we want to our footer.

Finally, we will add a Reference field from the right sidebar, so we can use it to relate content entries to our socials. We'll use the following information:

We'll click Add to save.

This is how you create a simple footer component containing a simple CTA and links. Creating the footer as a component, allows you to reuse the structure in different models in your project as if it were a template!

#Useful links

• Enumerations
• Components documentation
• References documentation