All of the WordPress theme sellers are nowadays under GPL License because of which its easy for the Bloggers to switch their themes every few months. Buy recently we found many websites which were offering downloads to WordPress with a few links in the footer. When the original theme developers website was not found, the users have to go through different theme distribution blogs and download the same through them.
All these links which are stored in the footer.php files cannot be removed easily because they are encrypted and you cannot just remove these codes because that would make the theme broken. Hence the only possible way left out is trying to convert the code into some understandable PHP code which the theme would understand.
There are two ways to get this task done.
1. Decrypting WordPress Footers : Whenever you get a theme with an encrypted codes you will have to decode the some using some online tools like this which would Decode all the Base 64 encoded text strings into usable format which you can later understand and remove the links. Once you get the Decoded code you can just paste it in the footer.php file by replacing the old code.
2. Replace with Default Codes : Another quick solution would be to add the default footer file codes which is mostly used and which can restore the footer function. First take a backup of the Encoded PHP code on your computer and then on the live version of the enabled theme on your blog, right-click and View Source. This will display all the footer information, where in you will have to copy the part normally starting from <div id="footer"> or <!%u2013 footer content starts Here %u2013>
You will also have to make a note that removing the footer links can bring in Legal issues because some themes would have Copyrights and this information is normally available under the copyright file stored under the themes folder. Though there are some cases when in removing these links is very important because linking to Casino, Adult websites from footer is not something most bloggers would like to do, hence the above solutions can help you in fixing the problem.
Nice post to help new bloggers because lot of theme comes with encrypted footer and if we remove whole code then theme stops working. Nice tip to decrypt footer code.
Instead of using default codes, One more suggestion. Leave the codes there for a moment. Open the blog in browser, check its source and check footer’s source. Copy that and paste it manually instead of the encrypted code and remove the bad links manually and don’t forget to add wp_footer() function manually. That should work.
yep this function does work and is much more useful rather the one i had mentioned in the post because some themes have some functions linked through the footer which are called from the header and other files. But the only problem is that its not easy for everyone to understand and implement this option. A beginner would be looking for easier options.
It is a great post .
1)I saw some themes with Encrypted codes .They were mentioned as Linkwear by developer and has more than 5 links to a bank,a webhost etc .I think they are advertisements . The developer warned “WARNING: This file is protected by copyright law. To reverse engineer or decode this file is strictly prohibited.”
But they have not mentioned the license which they release the themes under and asking $40 for each theme to remove the links .Am I allowed to remove them as you said?
2)By the way some other theme developers don’t encrypt the theme and ask us not to remove the footer branding .How do I proceed with such themes?
3)And some other themes would be release under creative-Common-License.What do we do with them?
Thanks !
Very nice post dear