How to change footer credit text in Twenty Twenty One theme with a hook?

Question

If I want to change the footer credits, I would usually copy the footer.php to a child theme and edit the following snippet:

<div class="powered-by">
    <?php
    printf(
        /* translators: %s: WordPress. */
        esc_html__( 'Powered by %s.', 'WordPress' ),
        '<a href="' . esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'WordPress' ) ) . '">WordPress</a>'
    );
    ?>
</div>

I'm trying to learn how to use hooks in WordPress and was wondering how I could do the same thing I did above but with the help of custom hooks in functions.php. What would be the right way to go about it?

Answer 1

That snippet contains no hooks, so there isn’t anything for you to hook onto.

If instead the file had something like:

<div class="powered-by">
    <?php
        echo apply_filters( 'credit-text', 'Powered by <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a>' );
    ?>
</div>

Then you could do something like:

add_filter( 'credit-text', 'wpse385946_credit_text' );

function wpse385946_credit_text( $credit ) {

    return 'Site by <a href="/">Me!</a>';

}

There's an added complication with the translation functions in the original theme: you don't want to use variables in them if the text in the variable might need translating. If your theme is for a private site rather than for publication, then translation might not be an issue for you.

IMO using the built-in template hierarchy with a child theme is the simplest way to do this. When you or anyone else comes back to the theme later, it’s then obvious how your change works. If you have a really compelling reason to do this in your functions file you could possibly hook into get_template_part somehow but it seems a pretty convoluted way to do something that the template hierarchy does for you already.