How to change your WordPress Copyright statement for 2012

Here’s a reminder of how to change your Copyright statement for your WordPress website for 2012

Examples:

Decide what this year’s statement should be

For a new site, created in 2012 you only need one year. For a site created in a previous year then you have choices; a range of years (2010 – 2012) or a list of years ( 2010, 2011, 2012) It’s up to you. Ditto for the rest of the wording, so long as you include the obvious:

the Copyright symbol ( © )
the word itself; Copyright or the abbreviation Copr.
your name or your company name
the years (as above)
optionally, All rights reserved

Login as an Administrator

Assuming your copyright statement has not updated itself automatically… then you will need to login to your WordPress site as an Administrator in order to make the relevant changes.

Backup your site

Even something as trivial as changing the Copyright years is fraught with danger. So don’t forget to backup your site before doing anything else.

Change all relevant instances

Your copyright statement should be changed in all relevant places. Follow the steps itemised below and with luck you’ll find them.

Change the Footer text

Choose Appearance then Theme Options
Change the Footer HTML: field, if necessary
Click on Save changes

Change Text Widgets

Choose Appearance then Widgets to show the different areas that support widgets.
Look at each widget that you think contains the current copyright text.
When found change the text and Save.

Change the Theme

If you have not found anything to change so far then there’s a good chance the text is built into the theme. At this point you may prefer to contact your friendly web designer, web developer to help you. If you want to go it alone, proceed with caution.

Choose Appearance then Editor.
For each theme that you or other users use.
Work through each of the template files, searching for the existing Copyright text.
If found, change the text then click Update file.

Artisteer themes

If you are using an Artisteer theme then you may have used the [ year] shortcode. This expands to the current year ( e.g. [year]) so your Copyright statement may have already updated itself. But you should really include the first year from which your content was created. So, wherever you find the [ year] shortcode being used in a Copyright statement you should add the first year before it.

Test your site

After making changes don’t forget to test your site to confirm that it still works. If it’s partly broken then retrace your steps to see if you can fix it. If it’s totally broken then you will need to recover your site from the backup.

Thank Herb by buying him a beer

This article was originally published as How to update your WordPress blog’s Copyright statement for 2011 For some details of how it’s done at IBM see http://www.scribd.com/doc/24947212/Copyright-2010-for-the-IBM-UoS-project-and-IBM-world-wide