Freqently people want to know how to customize the free templates that come with Joomla.  And, knowing how to do some template customization is an important Joomla skill to have.

A frequent question on the Joomla forums is, "how to I change or remove the "footer" text on a template."

It might be a "Template by ---- " or "Powered by Joomla"  or something like that.

So, how do you change that? 

The question of how to remove the footer text actually depends on which template you are using.  Different template designers use different approaches.

Now, if you are using the default template called "rhuk_milkyway" (the default template you get when 1.5 installs), then you must edit the html of the template to take out the "powered by" information.

Here's what you do.

In your administrative back end, go to Extensions -> Template Manager,  There you will see a list of the templates that are installed in your Joomla system.

Click on "rhuk_milkyway" and it will load a screen where you can do some customization of how the template works.

Next, click on the icon in the upper left corner that says "Edit HTML."

The html source code of the template will load in the editor.  Scroll way down to the bottom and you will see some lines like this:

<p id="power_by">
<?php echo JText::_('Powered by') ?> <a href="http://www.joomla.org">Joomla!</a>.
<?php echo JText::_('Valid') ?> <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer">XHTML</a> <?php echo JText::_('and') ?> <a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer">CSS</a>.
</p>

Here is were you want to make your changes.   If you just want to remove all of the Joomla / XHTML / CSS stuff, just delete all of the text that I have posted there. 

That will make it disappear.

Now, you may want to put something else in there.  No problem.  Just put whatever you want, for example:

<p id="power_by">
Site Design by SuperDuperWeb </p>

What about the Copyright Notice?

At the bottom of a default Joomla installation, you will see this information:

To remove this, you simply need to unpublish a module.

Go to Extensions -> Module Manager

Look for the module named "footer" and simply click on the "enabled" check mark to turn it off.

That's it!  The copyright notice is gone.