This is a rehash of a previous how-to, but now that us WP “developers” have updated to v4.3….some of the unwanted PHP scripts and other junk may have returned to our sites. Let’s fix it fast–right now! In my case I prefer to get rid of the footer materiel that plugs a) the theme OP creator and b) WordPress itself. Why do we ditch PHP scripts that form the backbone of what the audience sees when they go to our-self-aggrandizing-website.com?

1. Personalization – my site should contain MY approved content, especially links to 3rd parties
2. Ownership– no one needs to know that my site is “powered by” ANYONE except ME, my associates and (mt)
3. Control – anything viewed on my site NOT expressly approved by the publisher is unprofessional
4. Anonymize – no one needs to know (or cares) that The Picayune runs WP or it’s reliance on a PHP template

Let me elaborate on Ownership – this is MY SITE! MINE MINE MINE! Pride is NOT a sin in the creative and technical world, 3rd party link-stingers at the bottom of my pages say, “you may enjoy this site but REAL credit goes to the open-source Web development firms that wrote some code running in the background.”
^^^^ F— them. The publisher built this site from nothing, the publisher bashes his head in over every post and pixel, the publisher marketed the content and developed a loyal audience….THE PUBLISHER obeys all US Media Law and applicable media ethics…THE PUBLISHER creates original, rich, deep, informative, occasionally funny content… THE PUBLISHER was approved for Google Adsense almost a year ago. NOT WORDPRESS and certainly not a theme developer who’s code only loosely applies to what I still call “The Socal Picayune WP Theme 2015.”….so now that we’ve made updates, let’s try a quick how-to on what I call “WordPress footer anonymization.” Last time we had to re-write the “<>” (HTML & PHP browser directives) to “[]” as the “code” markup in WP 4.1 (or was it 4.0?) would glitch out, the WYSYWIG interpreting the brackets inside as real, despite the fact that the “code” (I’m still weary of using brackets for that word till the following test….) ostensibly tells your browser – “The following characters are all plain text – display them AS WRITTEN” — return to normal HTML when “/code” appears. For HTML beginners, this is the same as a bold command in a word processor. In a markup language a directive tells the browser what to do with incoming strings of text. Here is the simple example:

BOLD
— the rough equivalent of [strong] BOLD [/strong] –or– (b) BOLD (/b) ….again I’m using arbitrary beginning and ending brackets instead of “<” and “>” so as not to confuse the post the site will generate. Essentially in markup symantics, the directive %strong% indicates a change to the input string; the %/strong% (<—note the fwd-slash) indicates it is over. Ok…let’s give this a try… If WP 4.3’s WYSYWIG editor STILL bugs out on the “code” markup, I will post a snapshot this time instead of replacing all the greater-than & less-than symbols with ‘[‘ & ‘]’sTEST! 

1. Dashboard –> Appearance –> Editor –> open footer.php
2. Make a local backup copy of “footer.php” in case you screw it up
3. delete or comment out the code snippet pictured below
4. Update file (this will recompile the site with updated PHP script)
5. Visit site – (for QA/QC)

*UPDATE* “code” does not work w/in a WP post – It’s likely that the markup itself is followed by another markup using the less-than ‘<‘ sign – this exception is either not coded into WordPress’ WYSYWIG editor or fails on the front-end of common browsers. I really don’t have the interest to solve this, so here is a snapshot of the code I removed:

Let’s note what I removed in ditching the above:

• A banner link to WP.com (or .org….)
• A banner link to another webdev’s site

Let’s note what I DID NOT remove* (you won’t want to either. Directly above the call to a footer class, there is this command – “…do_action(‘generate_after_footer_widgets’);?> This fuction will return widgets embedded at the bottom of the page; MY content, so it stays. In my case, currently there are three footer widgets here– a plug for my fledgling podcast, links to other pages on the site and a calendar.

This test was successful on previous versions of WP v4 and is currently working no problemo on WP v4.3 running on a reliable server courtesy of Media Temple.
If you find the content here informational, entertaining, laughable or get SOME form of enjoyment out of it, you’d be doing us all a great big favor by checking out one of our generous sponsors. As always, there is no need to buy anything…not from me or any site plugged by me ever, but browsing Google Adwords-audited sponsors is of no danger to anyone. A banner ad may or may not appear below – the WP 4.3 testing continues….

Here is a less Object-Oriented example…this Stylesheets’s “original” author, or OP as I called one above, wrote so much unwanted junk AND script-kittied (nee plagiarized) so much of other’s that he mentions it’s “OK not to link to my site in the footer, but credit appreciated.” Sorry…. f— his “credit” take a look at the code:

Ok so as a courtesy you can see some names were changed and the Web site is bogus. Exercise: What PHP and HTML can we safely comment-out or outright delete?  To give you a hint this code will generate the following at the bottom of your page:

BlahBlahhoohooblahh 2015 WordPress Theme by www.someUnwantedBacklink.com Another Boring Theme

(another thing worth noting is that function ‘.date(“Y”)’ in this case will read the date from your computer, extract the year as a 4-digit integer and print it using the style defined for <p> in the stylesheet, I say this because it may not be 2015 when you read this and I don’t want to confuse anybody)

Ok…..ready? Here is a KISS-simple solution to wipe out all that nonsense (or rewrite/replace it with your own…link to an associated page or your client, whatver’s clever, You strip this down to:

</footer> </body> </html>

TaDaaa!

Is any of my content helping? If so…could do me a solid and visit one of my generous sponsors? I could really use the help. You don’t have to buy anything….that is part of The SoCal Picayune, Self-Similarity Studios and Tapper7.com promise: ads are clearly labeled, separated from site content and no financial obligation is ever expected of audience members. That said ….

*A note for beginning front-end developers: If I need to tell you why >? was not deleted, this is perhaps too advanced a tutorial – be careful not to remove /body or /html at the end of the file — again — make a BACKUP before changing HTML/JS/PHP etc. inside your page or it could be kablammo; you won’t destroy the site, but you WILL take it down and need to FTP as an administrator and swap out the PHP file to get your site back up. Unless you have unrestricted access to the backbone of your site … this will lead to a call for tech support from GoDaddy or whomever you use…and who the hell knows how long that will take? Learn as much about PHP, FTP, mySQL, HTML, CSS, JS and common contruction tools like Website Builder, cPanel and WordPress if you are a small operation – it will save you time, $ –and trust me it’s NOT COMPLICATED. These are not programming languages, they are scripts and applications – if you can put together a mean-looking Power-Point; you can do this!).
More posts, stories and podcasts coming soon, -t. []