I do appreciate your efforts and the gift that you give to the community. Honest, I am in awe of the software coders who give of their time and effort to give WordPress users such great code in plugins and themes.
That said, this is all GPL’ed software and this message in the theme is borderline misleading to users.
https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/browser/maskitto-light/2.0.8/footer.php#L36
<?php /*
*
* Plaese support theme developers efforts by donation to remove or change copyrights!
*
*/ $author_website = 'http://shufflehound.com/maskitto-light/'; ?>
Please notice that I wrote “borderline”. You don’t come out and say that the users can’t remove the links and you do say “please”. But your theme has been downloaded 37,000+ times and your link is in many, many places. That’s not a bad return for your time and that is the reason theme authors are permitted to do that.
There is nothing wrong with a user editing the link via a child theme and when a user does that then they are leveling up. They’re learning and becoming less dependent on others to manage and maintain their own WordPress site.
If a user wants to donate to a theme author for any reason, then more power to them.
But if a user wants to try and create a child theme then a simple way to do that is to create a child theme with these files in it.
https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
First create a directory like so wp-content/themes/maskitto-light-child
Then in that new directory create a style.css file with these lines in it.
/*
Theme Name: Maskitto Light Child
Description: Maskitto Light Child Theme
Template: maskitto-light
Version: 1.0.0
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
*/
That style.css file is so that WordPress sees the child theme. See the line Template: maskitto-light in it? That’s the part that tells WordPress that you are creating a child theme.
Also any CSS customization can go here too.
The second file is functions.php and contains these lines
<?php
// Queue up the parent Maskitto Light Child theme style.css file
// The parent theme CSS is already queued up via the parent
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'child_theme_enqueue_styles' , 15 );
function child_theme_enqueue_styles() {
wp_enqueue_style( 'maskitto-light-child-style', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );
}
This queues up the child theme’s CSS after the parent’s.
Now copy the file wp-content/themes/maskitto-light/footer.php into wp-content/themes/maskitto-light-child. Just that one footer.php file and nothing else.
In the copy (and not the original file) edit line 32 from
<a href="<?php echo $author_website; ?>">Maskitto Light</a> <?php _e( 'WordPress Theme by Shufflehound.', 'maskitto-light' ); ?></span>
to read something like this
<a href="http://YOUR-URL-HERE/">Monkeys From Mars</a> <?php _e( 'Monkeys ROCK.', 'maskitto-light' ); ?></span>
Or use any link or link text you like. I like Monkeys from Mars myself. 😉
Now in your WordPress dashboard activate that new child theme. If everything was done correctly then you’ll have a child theme activated with the links you want.
