WPThemesFree.com – Decoding the footers

Posted by Kris Bailey
February 19, 2009

Recently a friend asked for help setting up a website. When this happens I normally just throw a few minutes of time in to help set up a WordPress site and install a theme. I do a few minutes of customization to the theme to make it fit what they want and then go on my merry way.

This time the person decided they wanted this theme from wpthemesfree.com. It looks nice, I like color, and it fit what she was doing well enough. So, I downloaded the theme and installed it for her. I started to do my customizations ... changing some wording here and there to make it sound more business like instead of personal. She was doing the site for a business after all. Thats where the I ran into an issue...

Everything was going fine until I tried to remove the placeholder ad image in the right sidebar. It turns out that WPThemesFree.com encodes the footers of all of their themes (or at least all that I checked) so you can't edit them. I guess this is to keep advertising links inserted by the theme authors from being removed or something. Regardless of the reason, the theme was useless to my friend if they couldn't change the "blogroll" wording and take out the example ad space, so I needed to do something.

The content of the encoded files looks like this:

  1. <?php
  2. eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('NdI3kptQAADQfk/hzrtDAR8JBGOPdz5RIHKGxkM
  3. (... I cut out a lot of encoded junk here ...)
  4. zeDb3rdKHAZf5MKoaBFlvtD7QxrqhHtoLFPrz6+vr18f3/7A//gE=')));
  5. ?>

So, being that I don't like waiting on people I decided I would just decode it myself instead of emailing someone and hoping they decide to notice me sometime later. I wrote a small program to do the decoding, decoded the file, and made the small alterations I needed.

I thought that my hack to decode this might be useful to other people too so I put up an easy to use web interface for it here:
http://www.krisbailey.com/demos/wpthemesfree

Please keep in mind that the point of this decoder is to allow you to edit things the theme creator designed to be changed, like example ad space, or a sidebar that happens to be in the footer instead of a separate file. Please don't use it to remove ad links that the theme creators use to pay for their development time.

 

Design, WordPress Themes

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Comments

hi, i was unable to decode this. could you help me with it
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=0fbfa45960cc624ebda4076e811714c8e04e75f6e8ebb871
and could i send it to my email or contact me if can be decoded? thx

Comment by darkcast on July 18, 2009 @ 12:16 am

Why dont you just copy the HTML code from your internet browser and the put it in footer? simple – working

Comment by Michal on September 2, 2009 @ 3:41 am

Because the footers contain PHP code that does dynamic things. A lot of themes have dynamically generated menus in the footer, others have other things, this is just not an option unless you want to have to rewrite the dynamic parts.

Comment by Kris Bailey on September 10, 2009 @ 7:59 pm

All you have to do is view page source in firefox, copy everything in the footer div and then replace the coded stuff. Very very simple. If there is dynamic stuff that you need then you can always find it on the wordpress codex or some other site. there is lot’s of free code out there that you can copy and paste.

Comment by Aaron on February 12, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
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