Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
What is it you’re trying to do, in the bigger picture?
Decoding an encrypted footer. If I simply remove the code, the whole website goes down. Because of this encryption there are 5 very ugly links in my footer, very big and they’re all websites from other countries.
If this is decoded I’ll contact the author of the theme and give him the money. I just don’t want to buy his premium theme because I’ve changed all the files (styles/codes).
Thanks.
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
I don’t think it’s encrypted in the sense that you can just run it through a program and get the printout. (Look in functions.php and see if there’s anything of interest there).
If this is decoded I’ll contact the author of the theme and give him the money. I just don’t want to buy his premium theme because I’ve changed all the files (styles/codes).
Interesting logic… Sometimes just contacting the theme author will quickly clear up a lot of questions about alternative theme licensing schemes and let you discover whether or not you can even purchase a copy of the theme without this “kill switch” gimmick built into it. You might also consider that depending on the source, your copy might have been modified in a manner not intended by the original author.
Those are pretty compelling reasons to contact the author and see if you can get a clean copy of the theme and a license directly from the source.
if you use a theme that contains unreadable code, for all you know it could be setting up a back door to your site or forwarding spam – you have no easy way to know.
Obscuring the code in this way is contrary to the GPL license that themes inherit as derivatives of WordPress.
I would suggest you cut your losses and before you spend another 1000 hours tooling around with this junk, get a properly coded theme from an honest source – such as from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ or for commercial themes one of the vendors listed at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/
Hiding the code from view with CSS would not be a good solution – any hidden links to dodgy sites hidden like this are seen as hidden links to dodgy sites by google and I doubt google will reward you for it.
