Auto Update the Copyright Year in a Website using PHP or JavaScript

If you have been creating websites for years (or more than a year) I am pretty sure you have encountered the ‘copyright year’ issue. Let’s say you created a website www.dingdong.com in 2009 and in the footer of all the web pages in www.dingdong.com, there’s this line that says ‘Copyright © 2009, www.dingdong.com’.

Then comes the New Year of 2010 and when you wake up the next day after a night of celebration, you switch on the computer and visited your baby, www.dingdong.com.

Upon scrolling down, you see that the footer says ‘Copyright © 2009, www.dingdong.com’. You’re like, ‘Hello…? It’s already 2010 now…?!’ and you get a little bit angry. And then you remembered that you’ve got www.hi.com, www.byebye.com, www.iloveyou.com and so on and so forth. So if you have 1,000 websites, you’re in big trouble baby.

Well here’s something that would help you a great deal.

Auto Update Copyright Year using PHP

For me, I prefer PHP to JavaScript because the script is much shorter and cleaner.

This piece of code below will return you the current year:
<?php $yr = getdate(date("U")); print("$yr[year]"); ?>
It will display:
2019

So integrating HTML and PHP, this code below…
Copyright © <?php $yr = getdate(date("U")); print("$yr[year]"); ?> AzharKamar.com

Will show:
Copyright © 2019 AzharKamar.comLike the one in the footer of this page.

And that’s it for the PHP bit. Short and sweet. Now let’s go on to JavaScript.[adsense1]

Automatic Updating of the Copyright Year using JavaScript

Here’s the JavaScript code that will show the current year:
<script type="text/javascript">
var date_object = new Date();
var year = date_object.getYear();
if(year < 2000) { year = year + 1900; } document.write(year); </script>
Lengthy isn’t it? Use PHP then. ;-)

And…… That’s it! Good luck friends!