Quick Tip: Automate the Copyright Year in Your WordPress Footer

Having managed a variety of sites over the years, I’ve compiled a long list of pet peeves in the area of site maintenance. One of those is that every New Year’s Eve, you’ve got to rush in and change the copyright year in your footer on all of your sites. Depending on how many you have, this can be a real pain - but even with one site, it’s annoying enough.

I’ve been working on a new web project, and while coding I decided that I’d had enough and I wanted to avoid the annual rush and have the date update itself.

I base all my projects on WordPress, whether it’s a blog or something else entirely, so something that used minimal code by calling functions in the WP engine would be ideal. A bit of poking around and I found it - it’s not groundbreaking, but it sure is helpful if you’re like me and want to get the best results from minimal coding knowledge. Here’s the line of code I used to achieve the desired result:

Copyright © 2007-<?php the_time('Y') ?> Joel Falconer. Some Rights Reserved.

Just change the start year to match, and the name of the entity or individual owning the rights. Unless you’re using Creative Commons, you’ll want to change that last sentence to say “All worldwide rights reserved.”

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