How to modify a theme-bundled widget in child theme? - wordpress

Question

I want to remove the nofollow code from the latest posts displayed in the sidebar. I found that the code which adds rel=nofollow tag to latest post is located here
theme folder/example theme/lib/activity/plugin.php.
Here is the exact code:
private function get_latest_posts( $post_count ) {
// Get the latest posts
$latest_posts = get_posts(
array(
'numberposts' => $post_count,
'order' => 'desc',
'orderby' => 'date'
)
);
// Create the markup for the listing
$html = '<div class="tab-pane" id="recent">';
$html .= '<ul class="latest-posts">';
if( count( $latest_posts ) > 0 ) {
foreach( $latest_posts as $post ) {
$html .= '<li class="clearfix">';
// Add the small featured image
if( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ) {
$html .= '<a class="latest-post-tn fademe" href="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" rel="nofollow">';
$html .= get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, array( 50, 50 ) );
$html .= '</a>';
} // end if
$html .='<div class="latest-meta">';
// Add the title
$html .= '<a href="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" rel="nofollow">';
$html .= get_the_title( $post->ID );
$html .= '</a>';
// Add date posted
// If there's no title, then we need to turn the date into the link
if( strlen( get_the_title( $post->ID ) ) == 0 ) {
$html .= '<a href="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" rel="nofollow">';
} // end if
$html .= '<span class="latest-date">';
$html .= get_the_time( get_option( 'date_format' ), $post->ID );
$html .= '</span>';
// Close the anchor
if(strlen( get_the_title( $post->ID ) ) == 0 ) {
$html .= '</a>';
} // end if
$html .='</div>';
$html .= '</li>';
} // end foreach
} else {
$html .= '<li>';
$html .= '<p class="no-posts">' . __( "You have no recent posts.", 'standard' ) . '</p>';
$html .= '</li>';
} // end if/else
$html .= '</ul>';
$html .= '</div>';
return $html;
} // end get_latest_posts
Now please tell me how to remove the nofollow tag from this code using the child theme?

Answer 1

Since you have control of the child theme, you can wrap the call to display the widget zone for that widget with something that grabs the output, performs a regex search/replace on it, and outputs the result. I wrote a blog post about that recently:
Filtering the output of WordPress widgets
The basics are that you have a function that replaces dynamic_sidebar() with your own function, like this:
function theme_dynamic_sidebar($index = 1) {
// capture output from the widgets
ob_start();
$result = dynamic_sidebar($index);
$out = ob_get_clean();
// do regex search/replace on $out
echo $out;
return $result;
}

Answer 2

Seems that you are out of luck.
That's a private function and no filter hooks are offered by the theme author.
You may try to override the include('path/to/plugin.php'); and include your own modified version.