Have you checked Appearance -> Customize?
There might be those settings.
I checked. There’s no setting to delete those things. Only settings to add stuff to the reserved space. And it’s the reserved space that I don’t want
I see.
You need to customize a template file.
That is custom_home.php located in /wp-content/themes/formation/page-templates/
Or you can duplicate the file to make another custom template file.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Page_Templates#Custom_Page_Template
It is recommended to make child theme for editing theme, unless all the changes you make will be lost after theme update.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
That’s another issue. Because I am only working on a sub-website within my university’s system, I have VERY limited control over the root files, or even just the files responsible for my own website. I was wondering if there’s any way to bypass the need to gain permission to access those files. That would make my life a lot easier as I can just directly edit the PHP files.
OK. Then forget about creating custom template or child theme.
You can edit theme files from Appearance -> Editor, right?
On the right column, there is ‘Custom Home Page Page Template’.
Click and copy whole the code inside the main textarea and paste on any text editor.
Save it for backup, and duplicate it for editing.
Delete any section you want and copy it back to Edit Themes page.
If your change gonna deleted by theme update, just copy/paste the edited version again.
I know it might sound too easy, but maybe it would be better to not delete a bunch of code when you could just use css like display:none; on the elements you want to get rid of. . .
Unfortunately they have not unique class/ID for each divs.
I know still you can manage to display:none using nth-child selector or some sort, those hidden elements are still loaded.
So IMO, it’s better be deleted from source, and keeping original code for backup would be enough.
