Did you ever download a theme you really wanted to use for your business, but you found the theme’s footer contained a link to, say, a site promoting “Triple XXX Rated Adult Toys”. And when you went to edit the link out of the footer, all you could see was a string of encoded characters?
Searching the web, you will find many sites, including the WordPress Forums, talking about Base64 decoders.
There is a simpler way. Your ~internet browser~ can decode the string; otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read it as you visit the website.
Here’s how:
1. Upload and activate the theme. Remember that for a few minutes, as you do this little procedure, your site will be live with the spammy link, unless you are using the Theme Test Drive plugin.
2. Click Appearance – Editor
3. Click on Footer.php. See it? There’s the string of encoded characters that we need to convert to ordinary HTML so we can edit them.
4. Up at the top of the WordPress Dashboard, click Visit Site; you will be viewing your WordPress site with the theme installed.
5. Once your site is up on your screen, in your browser’s menu bar click View -> Source. (It Firefox, it is View -> Page Source)
6. A second window (or tab) will open displaying the HTML code for the page. Scroll down until you see some thing <!– Begin Footer –> or <div id=”footer”>
7. Copy everything in that Footer section … all the way up to the </body> tab and paste it into a text editor. Notepad will do just fine. (A word processor, such as Word, will farkle it up.)
8. Now edit the footer section as needed. Yes, you will need to know just enough HTML to recognize link code <a href=> and to write out your own link. But that is not too difficult, trust me on that.
9. Go back to the WordPress Dashboard. Click Appearance -> Editor, and click Footer.php to open it.
10. Delete the entire contents of Footer.php (all the encoded stuff), and paste in the new footer code you just edited. Click update. Click Visit Site to check the final product.
One important point: I always leave links to the original creator of a theme. It’s work. The person deserves credit for his or her work. If the theme’s creator has links to special causes, I leave those, too. (Chris Pearson’s NeoClassical Theme contains a link to Open Education, for example, although Chris does NOT encode any of his theme files.)
I just want to get rid of any links that might seem inappropriate for a business site, and I usually also want to add a credit for myself. Hey, if I hacked the theme beyond recognition, that’s work, too!
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