First off, the pupose of this post is so you can edit the encrypted footer for design purpose and not to erase the sponsor links.  I never tried to to decrypt a footer before, but I told someone that I would fix the right nav bar on their theme and it just so happened that the code for the right nav bar was encrypted into the footer.  The theme they were using is called Sleek Car.  You can download it here if you like it.  Over all the theme was coded very well.  The style sheet was labeled and layed out nicely, but the right nav bar being encrypted would probably cause a lot of people to give up on the theme and stop using it.  This is how I decrypted it and fixed the right nav bar.

Step 1

I created a new footer file.  I added the following code:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Step 2

I took a look at the index file to see where the following code started:

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Step 3

I clicked view source.  I copied all the code from </html> to where the <?php get_footer(); ?> code would  start.

Step 4

I pasted this code into my new footer document below this code: <?php wp_footer(); ?>

Step 5

Since the view source only shows the outputed HTML and none of the PHP code I had to make a few minor changes.  For example, where it called for images it had something like:

<img src=”http://mydomain.com/themes/images/ad.jpg”> I had to change to:

<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’template_directory’); ?>/images/ad.jpg” >

That was pretty much it.  You can do the same to pretty much any other theme.  Enjoy!