Unscrambling WordPress Theme Footers

I was using a theme for a while on this blog called Scruffy. It’s a well designed and fun theme, and i highly recommend it. While upgrading to wordpress 2.7 however, i smoked my wp-content directory, including my themes and plugins. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what scruffy was called, so i just browsed through the myriad of free wordpress theme sites until i found it again.

I then noticed something strange, my google analytics was returning no results. I’ve run into this before with other themes, if your theme doesn’t call the wordpress footer function before the end body tag, your analytics won’t work. So, i opened up my footer.php in the editor to drop that in there and blammo: the footer was scrambled.

I found this really strange, as it wasn’t previously. as well, the footer has this message:

WARNING: This file is protected by copyright law. To reverse engineer or decode this file is strictly prohibited.

And all that does, is desperately make me want to decode that file. Before i went and did that, I googled scruffy to find the original designer and to download it from the original source. Sure enough, the footer from FRESH01 is not scrambled. You could edit it all you wanted. What this means is that the free theme site i had download it from had altered the theme to include a link back to themselves for a theme they did not create. They’re making money off someone elses creation and preventing you from ensuring that all your plugins and features work.

So, before we go on, you absolutely, totally need to acknowledge the person who created your theme. Ideally this helps them generate some sort of income so they can continue making nifty themes.

Moving on…

The footer has this code, followed by a bunch of junk:

eval(base64_decode(“

Which would mean the following text had been encoded to base 64 and they are just using PHP to un-encode it on the fly. A quick google search will find you a number of sites which will decode base 64. I used this site for no particular reason. So, grab all the gobbeldygook between the quotes in your wordpress footer and drop it into a site like the one linked above (making sure to select decode). You should find returned the correct php/html for your footer, allowing you to edit it freely. Just copy it back into your footer.php, replacing all that junk and the php code that scrambles it and you should be good to go.

Checking back on the footer.php from the files directly from FRESH01, i can see that they have since updates their footer to include the missing tag. So, that free theme site is trying to bully you into using a broken, older version of a theme which they are re-distributing for their own profit. The lesson here is, if you find a theme you like, see if you can find its original creator before grabbing it from some third party.

Anywho, I hope that helps someone else out there.

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