Remove Powered By text from JDownloads

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JDownloads is a great component. It does it's job well, performance is good. It has it's problems, the source code is maintained but the architecture is outdated. It uses old Joomla 1.0 architecture for displaying views and NOT the Model View Controller architecture. I recently decided to remove the Powered By link at the bottom of component, turned out to be tricky. 

Even though jDownload states that you are not allowed to remove the Powered By unless you pay. There statement is faulty, the project is released under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. According to license you can modify and even distribute the source code. 

If you are still determined to remove the back link, there are 2 ways to do it.

Option 1 - Modify the component file

We need to open file with current path /site_root/components/com_jdownloads/jdownloads.php and comment out the code that generates the Powered By HTML.

Because of the old architecture, file has over 4,000 lines of code. You need to find line 2912 or so, I am using jDownloads 1.7.5 Stable Build 775. The line might be different depending on the version that you are using, but it will be around there...

You need to find the following code

 $b_link = JText::_('JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER');
    if ($b_link) {
        $footer .= '<div style="text-align:center" class="jd_footer"><a href="http://www.jDownloads.com" target="_blank" title="www.jDownloads.com">' . JText::_('JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER') . '</a><br />' . JText::_('JLIST_VERSION_FOOTER') . '</div>';  
 }

and comment it out so it looks like this

/*  
$b_link = JText::_('JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER');
    if ($b_link) {
        $footer .= '<div style="text-align:center" class="jd_footer"><a href="http://www.jDownloads.com" target="_blank" title="www.jDownloads.com">' . JText::_('JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER') . '</a><br />' . JText::_('JLIST_VERSION_FOOTER') . '</div>';    
}    
*/

Option 2 - Modify the language file for the Front-End

In option 1 you might noticed that there is a codition that checks is $b_link variable is set before adding Powered By text to the footer. To remove the Powered By text we need to set the JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER to empty string in the language file. In PHP empty string is evaluated to false and therefore will not fall into the condition to add Powered By text.

1. Open file located at /site_root/languages/en-GB/en-GB.com_jdownloads.ini
2. Find JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER around line 15  

   JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER=Powered by jDownloads

   and change it to 

   JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER=

   
   Do not comment JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER out because it will be translated to "JLIST_PRODUCT_FOOTER" which will evaluate to true and will display Powered By text. You have to set the value to empty.