I ran across a site yesterday, which is updated regularly and has quite a bit of good content, but I was slightly annoyed when I got to the bottom of the page and saw a “© 2003-2006″ — it’s already 2009! What that tells me is, while the site is updated regularly with new and unique content, the site owner hasn’t bothered to update the Copyright statement. There are reasons to keep it updated. First, to viewers like me it shows a lack of real site maintenance. Second, there could be some legal aspects to technically “claiming” content produced in, say, 2008, was Copyright two years prior.

Anyway, as frivolous as it is, I am surprised the good folks over at WordPress haven’t set this up to automatically update based on the date of installation, or at least make it an option to display the Copyright statement from the current date since the date of install.

Whatever! I digress. For those of us who are particular about stuff like this, here’s a quick and painless PHP script you can add to the Copyright statement of your PHP-based website, WordPress or otherwise, to automatically change to reflect the current year.

Copyright ©
<?php
if (date('Y') !== '2009') {
echo '2009-' . date('Y'); }
else
echo date('Y');
?>

You could change 2009 to whatever date you like, but the output of this script all year will be Copyright ©2009, then at midnight on December 31st, the statement will magically change to Copyright ©2009-2010 and so on for subsequent years. Just me, I’d rather do it once and forget about it. I use this on all the sites I build. Hope you find it useful! Happy New Year!

In working on one of my other sites, I searched all over for a script that would allow a dynamic adjustment of messages displayed, based on the time of day. I found a handful that were charging for such a script, so I decided to make my own!

Since many, or even most (depending on who you ask), websites for making money online are built around a core of the free and fantastic Open-Source software WordPress, a simple PHP function seemed the best way to handle this.

As you’ll see, the code is elegant and simple: and, by configuring it as a function, can easily be added to the functions.php (or a single file) file in your WordPress theme, without the hassle of installing YAP (Yet Another Plugin!) to be used throughout the rest of your WordPress theme — header, footer, sidebar, blah, blah, blah.

Drumroll, please (can you tell I’m proud of myself?)…

<?php
   function timeofday($morning, $day, $night) {
      $hour = date('G');
      if (($hour > 0) && ($hour < 10)) { echo $morning; }
      elseif (($hour > 9) && ($hour < 17)) { echo $day; }
      else echo $night;
   }
?>

In the above configuration, if the time on the server is 1am-9am it delivers the “morning” text. If it’s 10am-5pm, the script prints the “daytime” text. Otherwise, it displays the “night” text.

In this case, the “target audience” would be somewhere close to the same time-zone as the server. Otherwise, some more technical methods would be involved requiring Java to pick up the viewer’s timezone and pass the information to PHP, which I might cover later.

To use this function in your WordPress files, you can add the code above to the functions.php file of your theme, then insert the function where needed, just as you would any other function with parameters like bloginfo(), the_content(), etc.:

<?php timeofday('morning text', 'daytime text', 'evening text'); ?>

Hope this is helpful! It worked great for what I was trying to accomplish.