@dan After looking at the top pages component for some time I realized that I could use it to build the link table in my footer, by leveraging the FOLDER option of the component.
What I did was create three folders, one for each column in the table. I then added links to these folders and linked them to the pages of the site. Took me awhile to figure the correct link notation that would work in preview and live, but I got it in the end.
So what I’m curious to know is whether this is a valid use of this component? It works like a charm after deploying it on one of my sites so it seems valid.
However, in the process of doing this I uncovered a potential bug in the page panel with the rendering of the little icons alongside the links. I want these folders to not be visible in the menu system, but do I also want them marked as drafts? If mark the folders as drafts all of the links get the same marks, but they still end up working just fine. Clicking on the individual links draft icon will remove the link from my list but it will still show the mark icon, is that correct?
You can see this setup in the above screenshot.
After experimenting with this more I ended up just hiding the folders from the menu system and not having them set as drafts. So now they look as follows.
I’d like to know if this all makes sense and am I doing the right thing here. To me it seems a neat way to use the top pages component as it solves a problem with building these link tables. I could not use the normal capabilities of the component because I would have no control over which menu items got displayed where. My link table DOES NOT follow the menu layout.
Plus this approach makes it easy to add links in the future, simply by adding a link to the appropriate folder. Because the footer is a global the change would show up everywhere without me needing to visit the editor. The Power of Elements.