The new lab I work in at Indiana University has an annual progress report, with its own stylesheet. There is a template available for Microsoft Word, but I much prefer LaTeX, so I am trying to write my own class file for that. One of the quirks of the stylesheet is that footnotes from the title are numbered. To clarify what I mean, consider the fact that many journal articles include a footnote or two in the title or author listing which may be an acknowledgment or a clarification of what institutions the authors are working at. These footnotes are usually not numbered, but instead are marked with a symbol such as an asterisk or a dagger, and this is what LaTeX does by default, when one uses the thanks command. Since the reports I will be writing are very similar to articles, I decided to try to just hack the article.cls file into srl.cls. After some experimenting, I found the line in the maketitle declaration which gives the symbols instead of numbers.
\renewcommand\thefootnote{\@fnsymbol\c@footnote}%
I simply commented this line out.
I also commented out the line which sets the footnote numbers to 0 after maketitle is finished typesetting the title
\setcounter{footnote}{0}%
Presto! One part of the stylesheet is done.