[New] Cross-cutting infra: Footer and site navigation links are entirely hard-coded — no admin-managed custom nav/footer links

Area: Cross-cutting infra (audit p14) · Surface: templates/layouts/base.php footer · Dimension: competitor-gap · Severity: minor

Once a tenant can author custom pages (see the CMS gap), they need a way to surface them. Skool, Circle and Mighty all let the owner add custom links to the nav/footer (e.g. a Discord invite, a shop, a 'Start Here' page). Mobieus' footer is a static template, so even the one custom page a tenant could create (About) is only linked because someone hard-coded it. A tenant cannot add 'Contact', 'Affiliate Program', or an external link to their navigation without a code change. This makes the platform feel non-self-service compared to every competitor's link manager.

Evidence

base.php:488-494 the footer link row is hard-coded HTML: `<a href="/about">About</a> · <a href="/terms">Terms</a> · <a href="/privacy">Privacy</a> · <a href="/community-guidelines">Community Guidelines</a>` with a marketplace conditional. grep for `custom|nav_link|menu_item` in navbar.php returns only unrelated matches (notif-bell-footer, modal-footer). There is no data-driven nav/footer-link source anywhere.

Suggested fix. Add an admin 'Navigation' surface (a small ordered list of label + URL + placement nav|footer rows) read by base.php to render footer/nav links, defaulting to the current hard-coded set so existing tenants are unaffected.

Filed by the automated tenant-app audit and adversarially evidence-verified. Status: verified. Open — not yet actioned.