As a web professional, I provide comprehensive web project management and strategy. That means big things and little things. One of the little things I have noticed:

Many web sites have a copyright date of 2016.

It’s late March. March 2017.

This suggests that web managers, developers, etc. are still hard-coding their copyrights instead of just letting their CMS display the current year.

Why?

Thankfully, this oversight is completely avoidable. The site, updateyourfooter.com has solutions for WordPress/PHP and JavaScript which I have repeat here. I have included a few other content management systems as well.

Javascript

I’d rather do it from the CMS, but this a simple alternative to getting the current year in the copyright or anywhere else. We used this at GannettDigital long ago.

WordPress/PHP

In WordPress, add this line of code after the ©

If you are not sure where the copyright appears, check functions.php first.

Drupal

There are a few ways, covered here: Auto update to the current year in the copyright footer.

Ektron

I don’t have firsthand experience with Ektron, but here’s what I found when I searched for “add dynamic copyright to Ektron.”

That’s all there is to it, do it once and then never again.

Happy New Year!