My goal is to remove the “Blog” and “Donate” buttons (and pages) linked in the site footer, and edit the “About” and “Contact” pages.
I’ve looked into Comprehensive Theming, which seems like the right solution. Using this solution, I’ve copied the about.html and contact.html files from
...\volumes\openedx\edx-platform\lms\templates\static_templates
to ...\env\build\openedx\themes\custom-theme\lms\templates\static_templates
but I don’t know where to get the correct HTML file(s) to remove the “Blog” and “Donate” buttons.
You are looking at the right solution to override Open edX HTML pages.
Just like you have added about.html and contact.html pages in your theme directory, you can add footer.html file in your theme directory. And then remove unnecessary content from that HTML in your themed file.
The following steps are one’s that I initially missed: I needed to stop the services, run the tutor config render command with the --extra-config flag set to the config.yml file, then rebuild tutor and use the tutor local settheme command on my custom theme.