[dtdesign]

The existing page footer looks quite dated and has a few design issues that we want to rectify:

1. It consists of three blocks with different background, text and link colors, requiring a lot of effort to fine tune.
2. Using colored background links also heavily limits the available text colors while maintaining a sufficient contrast.
3. The boxes below the content (“Statistics”, “Users Online”, etc.) look like part of the overall page layout but in reality are tied to the content being shown.
4. The style changer is placed using floats which causes quite a few issues, sometimes overlapping densely populated boxes.
5. Offering additional controls like the color scheme switcher or the language selection requires a lot of effort and cannot be done in a backwards compatible way due to the bad layout decisions (see 4.).

Following the pattern of #6727 we have reused the principle of style options to introduce a new footer that ships as an opt-in feature while still offering the legacy view. We also moved the language selection into the footer because this takes up some space in the header and our language detection works reliably, thus this is barely ever useful. On mobile it stays an easy to reach option in the menu because scrolling down long pages is awkward in this device class.

Closes #6240

Fully Backwards Compatible

As mentioned above, the legacy page footer (once again dubbed “classic”) remains available and all previous styles default to this version. We continue to ship the same exact HTML and CSS that is required for existing styles in order not to break the backwards compatibility. The new footer uses the same switch mechanic as the page header, loading a different template and stylesheet.

Color Scheme Switcher

The new layout finally allows us to integrate the color scheme switcher properly without breaking existing styles. This feature is now available to guests too, thus they are no longer limited to the “system” preset. The availability of the color scheme switcher depends on the active style.

Previews

Disclaimer: The screenshots are from an active development version and are subject to change.

The footer with all available options. The language selection is available for guests only but is also used for the language switch in the developer tools. The style switcher is controlled by the existing option.