Dynamic Copyright Year in WordPress

Copyright dates are typically hard-coded into custom themes so now that we have crossed the threshold into a new year, it is a good idea to double check your site and make sure the correct dates are showing up.

It is an even better idea to just have the theme update them for you automatically – which is very easy to do.

Start by adding the following function to your theme’s functions.php:

function copyright($start_year, $site_name) {
  $year = date('Y');
  echo "© Copyright ";
  echo $start_year;
  if($start_year != $year) echo "-$year";
  echo ", $site_name, All Rights Reserved.";
}

Then, add the following to your footer template in place of your existing Copyright notice:

<div class='copyright'>
<?php copyright(2012, "Trionic Labs, LLC"); ?>
</div>

The first argument to the copyright function is the year your site first started publishing. The second argument is the site name.