Encrypting a footer with base64 will give any user the runaround when trying to configure the theme, but I have a solution to these encryptions. This is mostly because it’s not TRUE encryption. PHP can be converted to base64 (I’ll show you an example in a minute) however it’s interpreted by the web browser in HTML, therefore your average joe can decode/decrypt/undo this little trick and find the footer in php instead of ancient hieroglyphics.

Below I will show you, with screen shot examples, how to bypass this nonsense:

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Here are the steps that you need to follow:
First of all you need to navigate to the theme editor on your control panel. It is located under the Design menu. Once you are there follow these steps.

Find the index.php file. Click on it to open it.

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Now you need to find the footer include code. In most of the cases the code would look like this

<?php get_footer(); ?>

and would be at the end of index.php file.

If you are finding it hard to locate use Ctrl +F in your browser and paste the above code there. The browser will do it for you.
Now we need to add two simple codes one on the top and another on the bottom of the footer include code. These codes mean nothing but they will indicate to us the start and the end of the footer.
Adding these two codes will not make any difference in the functioning of the theme.

These codes are:

<!--THE FOOTER STARTS-->

&

<!--THE FOOTER ENDS-->

You can write anything you want between <!– and–>

Now our code would look something like this.

<!--THE FOOTER STARTS-->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<!--THE FOOTER ENDS-->

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Now open your site in the browser and view the page source. In most of the browsers you can view the page source by right clicking on the mouse and then selecting view source. In Mozilla the shortcut Ctrl + U works great.

In the source code you have to find the code that you have added at the top of the original code.You can safely scroll all the way down to the bottom to find these codes.

Copy all the code that is between the codes that you have added. This is the actual footer code.

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Copy this code and replace the original footer code (encrypted one) with this particular code. Now you can  change the footer the way you like.