My Drupal Blog

It would be nice if there were a module that would enable PHP, or at least that snippet, in the footer field in the site information page; it's not easy for a regular site content manager to FTP into the server, load up the page.tpl.php file, and edit the source code! The block solution is okay, but if Drupal has a footer area on the site information page, it should be a little more powerful, methinks.

What about adding token support to the footer field?

© Copyright [year]

I'm not legal expert, but if you're site has been around for several years, say since 2006, your copyright should say "Copyright 2006-2009" or the like. And it is considerably better to have the a copyright that ranges from 2006-2009 than just 2009 alone. So instead, you'd need (and excuse the psuedo code):

Thanks, will use this code for my themes.

Better yet, use Creative Commons which will fix more than just your PHP problem.

Nice! Who couldn't use this? Thank you.

I've been using a simple, token-esque solution for a long time (actually, I wrote it long before the token module was available). You can see it in action in my own site's footer. Here's how I do it:

1. Go to administer > site configuration > site information, and add a # character to your site's footer message (or, potentially, add some other character(s) of your choosing), eg:
   © 2002-# MySite Inc.
2. In your Drupal 6 theme's mytheme_preprocess_page() function (in template.php), add this:
   
   <?php
$variables['footer_message'] = str_replace('#', date('Y'), $variables['footer_message']);
?>

Also note that in Drupal 7, the footer message is a block and there is no more $footer_message variable, so this will no longer be an issue. You'll simply be able to add the PHP filter to your footer block's input format, and to implement Laurence's solution #1; and you'll also be able to use the token module.

To answer one of the issues above about regular site managers being able to access the theme files, use the Theme Editor Module and you can grant access to some of the theme files for them to edit.

straight and too the point, awesome! Helped me out thanks.

If I do this for 6.13 will it be easy to upgrade to 7.x?

You could also include the site title, so it's clear who the copyright belongs to:

That way if you make changes to the name of the site later, you would not have to touch the theme.

very easy and useful , i am going to use it for my site.thanks for this again....

We typically ignore the footer message area altogether and we often put the boilerplate and/or copyright message right into the page template.

We also use the footer region solution in a lot of cases where we want it to be editable by clients.

I've always kinda wondered about the point of putting a copyright message in place, after all, original work is supposed to be copyright to the author/s automatically, and certainly, having a copyright message ain't going to stop anyone copying (or heavily plagiarizing) your content...

Just a thought, maybe there are good arguments for it.

- Dave

I love PHP! Thank you for this !! and Brian thank you for the comment about the 2006-2009 thing - this also works in Wordpress too - with a couple of minor tweaks ex.Step one :)

Got this into a block and is working great

I just put a printf compatible format string into the footer message, for example:

© 2000-%d My Company Inc.

And then in the template use:

#16
You can check the United States Copyright Office for more information. Namely, check circular number 3.

Extract: "Use of the notice may be important because it informs the public that the work is protected by copyright, identifies the copyright owner, and shows the year of first publication. Furthermore, in the event that a work is infringed, if the work carries a proper notice, the court will not give any weight to a defendant’s interposition of an innocent infringement defense—that is, that he or she did not realize that the work was protected. An innocent infringement defense may
result in a reduction in damages that the copyright owner would otherwise receive.

" For works first published on and after March 1, 1989, use of the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the notice on any work first published before that date could result in the loss of copyright protection if corrective steps are not taken within a certain amount of time. The curative steps are described in this circular under “Omission of Notice and Errors in Notice.”

Re #16 & Re#26/

I just noticed that this blog is written from someone outside the U.S. / so the reference to the U.S. Copyright Office is somewhat irrelevant.

The issue with the copyright notice is that copyright law is mostly territorial, except for a number of international agreements into place... (see WIPO, etc.) if I am not mistaken, each country still has the right to either limit or increase the amount of damages that can be claimed, or the affirmative defenses that may be considered or excluded (innocent infringement, etc.), based on whether or not the copyright notice was present. So yes, it is still wise to add it.

Quite nice trick, thanks.

Thanks for the examples, we want to use a drupal blog rather than wp.

After seeing the comments about including the Site Name in the footer, I've done this as well as including a link back to the homepage and the standard footer_message variable.

I'm sure that I could clean this up a bit, but it works!

Thanks you all, It helped me. I was changing the date each year :)

Thanks for the tip. I'm just starting out with Drupal and it's the small building blocks like this that are making the journey bearable - thank for sharing.