It's pretty idiotic to try this on in the first place, given that theme code has to be under the GPL anyway. I suppose one should give the author of this artic

It's pretty idiotic to try this on in the first place, given that theme code has to be under the GPL anyway. I suppose one should give the author of this article the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is something they figured out for themselves, but there's a lot of prior art out there, e.g. [1], [2]. The other point to be made is that of course HTML output is not necessarily the only result of evaluating that obfuscated code (there could be side effects etc.), so a better approach would be to just run base64_decode on it so the source code gets returned, and then replace the obfuscated code plus eval call with that (and then modify it as desired). [1] http://wordpress.org/support/topic/300761 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/300761 [2] http://justfreetemplates.com/blog/2009/07/22/decrypting-encrypted-wordpress-footers.html http://justfreetemplates.com/blog/2009/07/22/decrypting-encr...