For those of you out there wondering how to remove that annoying banner that the CRE Loaded developers insert at the bottom of the page, I have found your solution.

Annoying

UPDATE: 2009-01-20: CRE Loaded SUCKS and is way too gimped by their own spam to make you upgrade to the NON-free version. Use Magento instead.

CRE Loaded is a pretty decent piece of open source (not any more) e-commerce software. Well, it’s pretty decent (not any more) if you ignore their MASSIVE use of global PHP variables.  Nevertheless, it’s fast and relatively stable.

The Standard version is free; however, you need to register yearly for a key for it (dumb). One of the downsides to the free version is that they forcibly and slyly include this really annoying banner at the bottom of their templates (UPDATE: 2009-01-20: among other crappy things that make the software too annoying to use for a free version. Use Magento instead)

Now, the likely first reaction to fix this is to grep through their codebase for some of the text and/or HTML that’s in that bottom banner.

Well, to our surprise the CRE Loaded developers were a little smarter than that.

Fetched From Afar

If the text from the banner isn’t in the codebase and it isn’t in the database, where can it be?

Well if you happen to glance in your CRE Loaded install, you’ll find the following file:

<cre loaded dir>/includes/application_bottom.php

Inside that file, you’ll find the stuff that happens at the end of the request pipeline. You will also see a call to the suspicious method cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(). Needless to say this function is the culprit.

If you search the codebase for cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(), you will find its definition in the file <cre loaded dir>/includes/template_application_top.php (talk about a misdirection)

If you stare at method definition for a while, you will see it makes a remote request (via cURL or include) to http://www.creloaded.com/cre_google.js.html,  which upon further inspection, contains the following text:

<div align="center">
  <table width="700" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
    <tr>
      <td><table width="720" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="4">
          <tr>
            <td colspan="4" class="main"><div align="center">This site is a member of the CRE Loaded Open Source <a href="http://www.creloaded.com/" target="_blank">Ecommerce Software</a> community</div></td>
          </tr>
          <tr valign="top">
            <td width="25%" height="60" class="main"><p><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/" target="_blank"><u>Ecommerce Shopping Cart</u></a><br>
               The scalability you demand.<br> The ease of use you want. <br>All the tools you need.</td>

            <td width="25%" class="main"><a href="http://www.chainreactionweb.com/" target="_blank"><u>Shopping Cart Hosting </u></a><br>
              Host your cart with CRW <br>for the industry&#39;s highest uptime and support. </td>

            <td width="25%" class="main"><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/Shopping_Carts/c30/index.html" target="_blank"><u>FREE Shopping Cart </u></a><br>
              Want to open a  web store <br>on a budget? Start with our <br>unlimited FREE version. </td>

            <td width="25%" class="main"><a href="https://www.crelance.com/" target="_blank"><u>Freelance Service Website </u></a><br>
            Need  feature or template work for CRE Webstore? <br>Hire a CRE Lance freelancer.</td>

          </tr>
        </table>
        <div align="center"><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/welcome_standard/home.php" target="_blank"> <img src="https://www.creloaded.com/cre_google.images/cre_loaded_ecommerce_logo30.gif" alt="CRE Loaded Commercial Open
Source Shopping Cart - opens in new window" width="168" height="30" vspace="3" border="0"></a></div></td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</div>

Those little tricksters!!!

The Fix

Since this is open source software, we can fix it legally!!!

Just comment out the call to cre_uregisterBasicFunctions().

File = application_bottom.php

// cre_uregisterBasicFunctions();     // <- COMMENT ME OUT

Now the banner is gone!