How to Display a Copyright as a Range of Dates

Jeff Starr — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:06:44 +0000

Technically, your work is protected under copyright “the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” [1] Registration of your copyrighted work is not required [2], but you should include a copyright notice on all published works [3].

Displaying a copyright statement in the footer of your web pages is easily done with something like this:

Copyright ©  Digging into WordPress

This code will output the following text:

I think most of us are familiar with this technique, as it would be a total pain to manually update the copyright date on all of your sites every year.

But what if you want to display your site’s copyright statement as a range of dates instead of just the current year? Many sites do this, and I am guessing that they do something like this in their source code:

Copyright © 2008 -  Digging into WordPress

While this method certainly works, it would be better to automate the process and have the range of dates displayed dynamically. This would be especially helpful for publicly released themes, where you want to minimize the amount of “fiddling” involved with the setup and configuration process.

To display a copyright as a range of dates for your theme, add the following function to your theme’s functions.php file:

get_results("
		SELECT 
			YEAR(min(post_date_gmt)) AS firstdate, 
			YEAR(max(post_date_gmt)) AS lastdate 
		FROM 
			$wpdb->posts
	");
	if($copyright_dates) {
		$copyright = "Copyright © " . $copyright_dates[0]->firstdate;
		if($copyright_dates[0]->firstdate != $copyright_dates[0]->lastdate) {
			$copyright .= '-' . $copyright_dates[0]->lastdate;
		}
		echo $copyright . " " . get_bloginfo('name');
	}
}
add_filter('wp_footer', 'copyrightDate');
?>

That’s all there is to it. Nothing else needs to be done in order for this code to output the something similar to the following:

If your site is less than a year old, the function will simply print a single-year copyright date:

By default, this function will display this information wherever the following hook is located in your theme:

If this hook is not present, of if you would like to customize the location of the copyright statement, simply call the function anywhere in your theme with the following tag:

Depending on your theme setup, if you call the function directly, you may want to comment out the last line (i.e., add_filter()) in the function itself to prevent duplicate output.

References

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
[2] Unless you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work.
[3] Source: Intellectual Property: Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights and Trade Secrets

Dynamic Copyright in your WordPress Footer

Chris Coyier — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:44:16 +0000

Many footers on websites contain text like “© 2009 Your Website”. A good measure, surely. We can use some classic PHP and a built-in WordPress function to make this bit of text dynamic so that it will never need to be tampered with manually again.

©

The year will always be the current year, based on your server’s set time. The text will come directly from the Blog Title setting in Settings > General.

Digging into WordPress » copyright

How to Display a Copyright as a Range of Dates

References

Dynamic Copyright in your WordPress Footer