I’ve been managing websites for years manually changing the copyright date as each year passed by and surprisingly this is the first year I thought about how to automatically update my WordPress copyright date.  It’s a very easy process and I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner.  All you have to do is take your WordPress footer include page and replace the copyright year with a little piece of PHP code.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

How To Automatically Update Your WordPress Copyright Date

  1. Log in to your WordPress Blog
  2. Click the Appearance Hyperlink in the left navigation bar.  This will bring you to the Appearance page and also expand the Appearance dropdown.
  3. Click the Editor Hyperlink under the Appearance drop down.  This will take you to the edit themes page.
  4. In the right navigation you will see your theme files.  Depending on your theme these files may differer, but all themes should have a file named Footer (footer.inc).  Click this hyperlnk to open the file in the theme editor window.
  5. As I mentioned everyone will have a different theme and the contents of your Footer file will most likely be different then mine.  However, if you have either a static (meaning you’ll see the actual date like “2008″)  copyright date then you need to change this to a dynamic (meaning depending on the year the date will programmatically change to the current year) copyright date.
  6. You can automatically update your WordPress copyright date by adding the following code instead of the current year you see in your footer.inc file.
  7. Delete the year (for instance “2008″).  Replace the year with <?php echo date(“Y”) ?>
  8. Click Update File

*Note – depending on your theme you may not have a copyright date or your copyright date may already be automated.  To verify your copyright date just take a look at the bottom of your blog and make sure you see the current year.  If you’d like to add a copyright date just follow the same steps as above and add the following code where you’d like to see the copyright date:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(“Y”) ?>

That’s it!  Now you no longer have to worry about updating the copyright date in your future years of blogging.  It may seem trivial, but the copyright date is something I usually remember to update around February.

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