Perennial – Auto-Updating Copyright Year Block

Every site has a copyright line in the footer, and every site eventually has the wrong one — because the year was typed in by hand and nobody remembered to change it.

This plugin adds a single block that works the year out when the page is served, so the notice is right on 1 January without anyone touching it.

What it does

• Shows the current year, resolved in your site’s timezone — not the visitor’s browser.
• Optionally shows a range — © 2001 – 2026 in English. Set the start year to the current year and it shows that year on its own rather than a range of one. The format is translatable, so a locale can set its own separator, numerals or placement for the © symbol.
• Uses your site title as the copyright holder by default, so renaming the site updates every notice at once. Type a different name if you want one.
• Optionally appends “All rights reserved.”, punctuated correctly.
• Lets you style the year separately from the rest of the notice — its own color, font size and weight. The © symbol follows the year’s styling.

Built to stay correct

The notice is rendered on the server, which matters more than it sounds:

• The year is never written into your post content, so it cannot go stale, and your saved posts never break when the year rolls over.
• Search engines see the finished text in the page source, with no JavaScript to run first.
• No JavaScript is loaded on the front end at all — on any theme. On a block theme the stylesheet is inlined into only the pages that use the block; on a classic theme WordPress loads every registered block’s stylesheet site-wide, including this one.

The one thing server rendering cannot fix is somebody else’s copy of the finished page. So when the year turns over, the plugin clears the cache for you on WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed Cache — those four. Any other cache can clear itself by hooking the rollover action; see the FAQ.

Alignment, color, spacing, font size and line height all come from the standard WordPress block controls, so the notice inherits your theme’s palette and type scale rather than fighting it.

External services

This plugin contacts no external services. It makes no network requests of any kind — no license check, no update check of its own, no analytics, no telemetry, no remote fonts or assets. Nothing about your site or your visitors leaves your server because of it.

The one thing that might look like an exception is not one. When the year turns over the plugin clears the cache for WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed Cache — but it does that by calling those plugins in PHP on your own site, if they happen to be installed. That is a function call inside WordPress, not a request to anybody.

Source code

The editor JavaScript this plugin ships is compiled. The sources it is compiled from are published here, tagged to match each release:

https://github.com/theghostlab/wp-ghostlabs-perennial

That repository holds the plugin exactly as distributed, plus the src/ it was built from and the lockfile, package.json and webpack config needed to rebuild it. A clean install and a rebuild reproduce the shipped bundle:

The bundle that ships inside the plugin is minified, which is the whole reason that repository exists: the readable source is published there rather than padding every install with it. Nothing is obfuscated.

The plugin loads no JavaScript on the front end at all — that bundle is the block editor’s, and nothing else.