So, in my shortish WordPress development career, I’ve gotten in the habit of creating a “page” for the content in a footer, and adding different fields with the wpalchemy class. Everything with this approach seems to work fine, except for the fact that users can go to mysite.com/footer and see something I do not want them to see.
Should I somehow force this url to 404? or is there something fundamentally wrong with my approach?
I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with your approach, I see it pretty often.
You could hook
parse_requestand 301 redirect any requests to footer to the front page. I wonder though how visitors would end up there in the first place, as long as you exclude it from the sitemap and don’t link to it anywhere.Or you could create a custom post type for this kind of content and make it not publicly query-able.