If you think this information is infringing on any ones right let us know in the comments below. I design custom themes and know how difficult it is coming up with one half a decent one. My graphic designer at times thinks of charging me exorbitantly till I told him I do all of that for fun.
So I fully understand how hurtful the information I’m giving out could be to developers out there who don’t want their efforts to be like a wasted one Considering the time they put in to come up with a decent theme they deliver to you for free demanding only those links and credit back to them. My judgement is simple – give them the footer link and save the uniqueness of your theme customization .
This became necessary as most users no longer wanna put any form of effort in developing something unique despite all the good things cms has done to mankind requiring you to only edit a theme to have something spectacular. Now take a look at this ” When I first discovered that mashable.com uses wordpress” I was like wow so cute stuff like this could be done on wordpress ? then I spent like 10mins viewing the source code trying to figure one thing or the other. This is same story for every lazy blogger out there who chooses to do worst things than this ————— surprised ?———-ok let me narrate to you what they do ———-Hey I stumbled upon this wow site i love the layout today——– next what cms platform is this site using ?——— after finding out the cms platform ——- they go ahead and install the cms platform on their site using one click installer and the likes —— next they install exactly same theme that you are already using ——- the bitter side is that they will copy your entire style.css , function.php , .js and custom.css ——-replace theirs with it to make a clone of your own site and claim the design copyright …………..lol.
From the above narration one can deduce that the culprits we are writing about here are only plane novice who are lazy and lacks creativity as well and wouldn’t know any other advance method of hacking through your info base if the little tips below is fully followed and implemented appropriately .
Remember there are thousand and one reasons why you will want to hide the theme information from the public . You wouldn’t want the design you rendered for a client to be exactly replicated elsewhere effortlessly and you also want your own site to preserve it’s uniqueness from thousand and one other people using same theme with you.
Steps to Hiding WordPress Theme Information: First deactivate your current wordpress theme (the theme you wanna hide the info ) then log in to your site cpanel navigate to the folder where your blog / wordpress site is installed and locate the theme by navigation to /wp-content /themes — rename the theme folder to any name of your choice from here and open the theme directory now edit the style.css to change any info contained in the lines that start with :
/*
Theme Name:
Theme URI
Author:
Author URI:
Version:
Tags:
Copyright:
License:
*/
Edit accordingly and save . Edit / delete the screenshot.png of the theme then edit readme.txt and go back to your wordpress admin dashboard navigate to appearance/ theme and reactivate your theme . Info cleared from lazy copiers .
Steps to Hiding Smf Theme Information: First deactivate your current smf theme (the theme you wanna hide the info ) by choosing either the smf default or any other theme then log in to your site cpanel navigate to the folder where your smf forum is installed and locate the theme by navigation to /themes of your default smf directory— rename the theme folder to any name of your choice from here and open the theme directory now edit the “theme_info.xml” to any name and description of your choice . —-> Finally log in to your admin panel and go to theme settings —— from there you will find out that your theme is still bearing the old — click on the name to open the edit —- change all info to reflect with you ‘ve already configured in your cpanel activate the theme again from theme selection menu viola your theme info is hidden.
Steps to Hiding Other cms Theme Information: Both drupal , joomla and any other cms platform can be tweaked using the info above . hope this helps us to preserving our efforts from every tom , dick and harry .
Other stuff like wp-admin , wp-includes , wp-contents can also be changed but will require great time as you will need to re-do it at any major upgrade
share your thoughts vai the comments below
Hope this can be done offline, I mean editing the theme/templates before uploading it?
Sure, you can easily do that offline using wamp or xamp server to preview…… even without the wamp/xamp servers you can just edit with notepad++, Dreamweaver and the likes
Thanks for dropping by Robinson3d , It isn’t any copyright infringement and shouldn’t be taken as one . At times I go as far as re-writing the link structure, hiding main source and licence.txt for security reasons , same for other users who might want to hide it for other personal reasons
That is nice. But sounds like copyright infringement.