Selling links in footer of WordPress themes is a common practice by WordPress theme developers.

I personally do not have anything against or I am not against giving credit to the author. But it doesn’t end there. There are a few folks who just stick up unrelated ads and at times more than one ad just for a few extra bucks ! Imagine your site linking back to – unrelated, not so family friendly sites, such a pain !

Here’s how you can decode the WordPress Theme Footer and change the content and remove unwanted links :

Copy the encoded content and paste it in the text box area in OpinionatedGeek. Click on Decode and you’ll get the decoded content, which you can copy and replace it in footer.php.

However, there are developers who make it really hard for you to decode the footer links, then try this :

1> Open your index.php and find

<?php get_footer(); ?>

2> Place a HTML comment that you can easily recognize, before and after

Something like:

<!– footer content starts Here –>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<!– footer content ends Here –>

3> Visit your blog

4> View the source

5> Copy the HTML source between the two markers

6> Open footer.php and replace the encoded content with the HTML code.

Note: Most themes will have a license that’ll not permit you to change the footer links. If that’s the case, then you are better off finding another theme 😉

57 COMMENTS

  6. Wow! That works like a charm 😀 It really annoyed me. I wanted to make the theme my own but with the stupid links in the footer that wouldn’t work. Not it’s easy to make it my own! Really thankful!

  7. im having a problem with decoding a footer similar to what eataphatty had with press 75 . I got a link in the footer that i cant remove ( due to being unable to decode) and tried breaking up code as above to decodeonly teh code ,,, all methods but cant seem to get the code decoded.

    can anyone help

    this is what i get from teh decoder
    The particular error here was:

    The input is not a valid Base-64 string as it contains a non-base 64 character, more than two padding characters, or a non-white space character among the padding characters.

    there seems to be 2 sets of codes in the footer

  10. Ian :
    Just delete them all – 2 encoded sections from the header.php and 4 in Function.php
    The bits to delete are these: http://wordpress.pastebin.com/m19fa7e24
    Then just delete the footer2 div in the Footer.php and it works fine.

    Thanks IAN, this method worked for me. I was having trouble deleting the encoded footer for INNER 1.0 (template by NewWpthemes). It would be nice if they were upfront about their encoded footers before we download them and spend hours customizing the template and widgets etc…
    Live and learn. But at least it can be decoded. Thanks

  11. Nice! I had earlier just gone into the css and found all the footer CSS. I made the text size 1px, then hid the text altogether with: visibility:hidden;

    But this is way better! Thanks!

  14. IAN #15 You are a genius mate – It worked perfect. i even managed to change rather delete the footer links once the code was removed -THANK YOU SO MUCH.

  15. Can some one please help me with this footer code:
    ————————————————————————-
    /*****/
    ———————————————————————–

    I want be able to add this code:

    function remove_footer_admin () {
    echo “Your own text”;
    }
    add_filter(‘admin_footer_text’, ‘remove_footer_admin’);

  16. Can some one please help me with this footer code:
    ————————————————————————-

    ———————————————————————–

    I want be able to add this code:

    function remove_footer_admin () {
    echo “Your own text”;
    }
    add_filter(‘admin_footer_text’, ‘remove_footer_admin’);

  20. Hey….hellow unfortunately I cant do this with my code… Can You Help me…??? please reply.. plz plz I’m waiting 4 u.

    thanks

  30. @EataPhatty
    Ah! select everything between “” before decode 64 string? The decode 64 string is useless I presume? Example: Use everything between $o=” and ”
    Don’t use anything after eval(base64_decode(” ?

  31. I get this with press75:
    The input is not a valid Base-64 string as it contains a non-base 64 character, more than two padding characters, or a non-white space character among the padding characters.

    So how do we use the info in the theme to decode these few files?
    footer.php and index.php (one or the other) are base64 and decode properly depending on the theme, but the other says base64 in the code but will not decypher. Someone, if that’s you, please show us how to decypher these properly.

  34. Not working for me, really think that dev’s encoding should jump off a cliff. For people like me, who work TOTALLY for free. Encrypting the stuff to just add a freaking link or something is a hassle….

  44. @Cal can you give me the link to the original theme so that i can take a look at it, n let you know how to go about it.

    Cheers

  45. Any ideas how to decoded the footer links from newwpthemes.com? I don’t mean to remove the author’s link but there are like 3 encrypted codes in the function.php….I’m really curious what’s hidden in there. Feeling unsafe to use it.

  50. Sadly, doesn’t work for me. They encoded the index.php, which means I can’t place that HTML code in. Any other fixes apart from OpinionatedGeek? cause that sucks.

  56. @Rockstar – Practically speaking, encrypted footer is not ethical when you release your themes under GPL in wordpress 🙂 .. But there are always ways to get rid of them 😉

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