How I updated my footer copyright year automatically

[Marcio Duarte]

One day, I was looking for a way to dynamically add the current year to the copyright statement in the footer of my website. You know, so that I wouldn’t have to manually edit it every New Year’s Eve. But I only found shortcodes for that.

There probably was already a block to do that somewhere, but I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to develop a custom block from scratch. I ended up creating a simple block plugin that does just that: it inserts the current year.

I’m a firm believer in modularity when we’re talking about blocks. There are lots of block libraries out there, but the problem with this approach is that if you need just one function, you end up including a lot of unused code in your WordPress instance.

You can find the block plugin here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/dynamic-year-block/

This will probably be integrated into the WordPress core sometime in the future, but for now, it’s a refreshingly simple way to solve this issue. Not to mention that it opened up a whole new horizon for me in relation to block development. Enjoy.

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[niall_flynn]

<?php
$year = date("y");
echo $year;
?>

Create a short code with that in it, call it [copy-year] add it to the block/classic editor/builder. It should say year started too so 2000-2023 or your saying it’s been copyrighted this year. Easiest fix is not to include the year.

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[niall_flynn]

https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcode-for-current-date/#description seems to do the same thing.

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[Marcio Duarte]

I know, but shortcodes were exactly what I was trying to avoid.

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[niall_flynn]

Plugin is block and shortcode, so has both.

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[Marcio Duarte]

Thanks, but that block still uses the shortcode in its underlying code. As I said before, I wanted to get rid of this – for good.

Also, it adds custom admin notices, a dashboard panel, and links to other commercial plugins. You know, non-essential things for me. My WordPress dashboard is already too cluttered.

Don’t you think we can have a bare-bones plugin, that does a simple thing and nothing else? I surely do. Hence, the above option.

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[yochaiglik]

Amazing!
I also use that opportunity to learn a bit more about block development
I followed this tutorial

What did you use for local wp env?
Was it wp-env? Localwp?

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[Marcio Duarte]

@yochaiglik I’ve used Local WP, which I really like.

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[Seth Goldstein]

@MarcioDuarte Thanks so much for this!

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