How to Auto-Update Your Blog Copyright Message

It won’t be very long now and we will be in the midst of the holidays with the New Year right around the corner. It is not too early to think about the business taskss that will need to be taken when the New Year arrives. Now is a good time to make the list of the things that you will need to do. What is even better is to determine what you can automate now and then not have to worry about when that time comes. One of the activities that needs to be done is to update your copyright message. If you don’t have one, you should go ahead and add one. This is important and also gives your blog a professional look.

Even from a manual standpoint, this is not something that is difficult to do. It just involves getting into your WordPress admin portion of your blog. All you have to do is to edit the footer.php file that is found in the themes editor. Once you find the part that has the Copyright and year, then all you have to do is to update the year. If you have one blog it takes a couple of minutes. If you have several blogs, it can take some time so why not automate the process. That is something that you could then cross off your end of year tasks now.

So let’s see how to automate this process. Go into your WordPress admin portion of your blog. All you have to do is to edit the footer.php file that is found in the themes editor. You must be sure to have the file permission set to writable for this file. If you do not have the correct permissions set, you will need to FTP in to change the rights to the file or update the file using FTP. Find the portion of the file that contains the copyright message and replace it with

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> Blog Name

The “<?php echo date(‘Y’); ?>” portion of the code automatically brings in the year from your web server.  The “&copy” creates the copyright C logo. This only works if your server is set to the correct year. If it’s not, you’ll have to contact your web host and get them to adjust the date. That is all there is to it. Now, instead of trying to remember to change the copyright notice at the beginning of the New Year, as long as the clock on the server is correct, it is all automated for you.