A brief note about extending your Copyright statement to reflect the original creation date and the most recently updated date. e.g.
(C) Copyright Bobbing Wide 2012-2014
If you’re a WordPress plugin or theme developer then you’ll be used to include at least one comment block in your code that contains a Copyright statement.
For something that you create in 2014 then the format of your statement might be something like this.
(C) Copyright Bobbing Wide 2014
But if you developed your code in a previous year, you shouldn’t simply change the year number.
You should extend it to reflect the years in which you first copyrighted your product and the years in which it’s been changed.
So something developed in 2013 will now have a statement like this
(C) Copyright Bobbing Wide 2013,2014
If the year span is greater than one year, rather than listing all the years in which you changed the product
(C) Copyright Bobbing Wide 2012, 2013, 2014
you may wish to indicate a range
(C) Copyright Bobbing Wide 2012-2014
In my
oik plugin I provide a shortcode [bw_code bw_copyright] that does this automatically for the website.
It makes the assumption that you did actually create content in each of the intervening years between your first post and the current year.
© Copyright Bobbing Wide 2012-2026. All rights reserved.
Note: the text after the word Copyright comes oik options.
The shortcode also appends “. All rights reserved”.
I just happened to notice that Pippin Williamson hasn’t followed these guidelines in Easy Digital Downloads.
I assume he wasn’t aware of them.
