Many website owners and developers will have experienced some type of template theft in their internet career, cases range from simply stealing CSS to an entire websites template being ripped and recreated. More often than not it an error on the website owners part as the leave entire template directories browse able, this allows others to freely look at their HTML and CSS and copy any parts they would like. Today’s article will show you some ways to protect your website themes / templates, no solution is foolproof but the one’s we will show you help make it as difficult as possible for any would be template trolls to rip your html or css.

In Feburary we wrote an article titled “How To Protect Your Custom Pligg Template TPL Smarty Files” specifically aimed at smarty .tpl file template theft, if you own a pligg site it’s an article you wont want to miss. The methods we use to protect smarty files with .htaccess can be extended to virtually any template system including plain old html. This should be the basic first step you take to protecting your template directory from being open to anyone for browsing.

We have also had some requests lately asking if there is anyway to protect .css files from theft or unwanted browsing. CSS files can be opened and read by anyone as long as they have a direct url to the css files location on your web server, this allows unwanted guest’s to browse and copy any code they wish from you CSS.

How do you stop users being able to open CSS files then? nice one studios has written a great tutorial detailing how to hide css files from being browsed. It’s worth noting this is an experimental technique and should be tested first before any live implementation.

How It Works

In the index file, before we include the CSS file, we’re setting a key (using sessions) and in the CSS file, we check if the key is set and if it’s not, we make it stop executing the code so it wont output any CSS. And if the key is set, we output the CSS code and change the key to something else.

So basicly, the CSS file won’t work without the index file, because that’s where the key is set.

In other words a user can no longer simply open and browse your css files from their web browsers, even if they have the direct url which they wont be recognized now.

Tutorial: CSS File Protection Using php key (sessions)

Hopefully this should give you a few ideas relating to template security, also let us know your results if you try the css protection method.

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