Category: How To

At the bottom of every page on my site is a little bit of info declaring copyright: “Copyright © 2017 Mika A. Epstein”

How do I do that and not have to update all my site themes and widgets every year? With code, of course! I have both a function I could use in themes and a shortcode I could use anywhere a shortcode can be used.

The Code

There are two functions, the base code and the shortcode. The concept is that if you don’t put in a year (which is the start year for your copyright) it will only show the current year. If you do put in year, it forces it to be an integer and then does a couple checks. The checks were originally as follows:

1. Is $year ‘auto’? Force this year.
2. Is $year this year? Force this year.
3. Is $year equal to 0? Force this year.
4. Is $year greater than this year? Oh, silly human. Force this year.
5. Is $year less than this year? Use the ‘start – end’ format

The reason for this is practical. We’re sanitizing things as early as we can, and then we’re checking for the logical and illogical entries. If someone decides the year is ‘Bob’ then intval() throws a 0 and since 0 isn’t actually a valid year in the Gregorian calendar, then I can do a simple “if 0” check.

But … I’m not so bold as to assume the only people who will want this are using the Gregorian calendar. To be more universal, I changed the code to make the first check for if the year was set to ‘auto’ (which defaults to this year), or if it was a non-number. If it’s not a number, you get forced this year. Otherwise, the code trusts you.

function helf_auto_copyright( $year = 'auto' , $text = '' ){ 
	$year = ( $year == 'auto' || ctype_digit($year) == false )? date('Y') : intval($year);
	$text = ( $text == '' )? '©' : sanitize_text_field( $text );

	if( $year == date('Y') || $year > date('Y') ) $output = date('Y');
	elseif( $year < date('Y') )  $output = $year . ' - ' . date('Y');	

	echo $text . ' ' . $output;
}

function helf_auto_copyright_shortcode( $atts ) {
    $attributes = shortcode_atts( array(
        'year' => 'auto',
        'text' => '&copy;'
    ), $atts );

    return helf_auto_copyright( sanitize_text_field($attributes['year']), sanitize_text_field($attributes['text']) );
}
add_shortcode( 'copyright', 'helf_auto_copyright_shortcode' );

The one failing here is I only account for the common era (or ‘AD’ for those who didn’t know we all switched to CE a while back). I’m sure this can be extended to BCE if so desired. Spitballing, I’d just use negative numbers, check for them and output ‘year BCE – year CE’ instead. But that’s a little much for this use case.

Usage

As a shortcode: Copyright 2016 - 2025

As a function: helf_auto_copyright_shortcode( '2016', 'Copyright' );

Both will output the same thing (as of 2017): Copyright 2016 – 2017

And in 2018? It will magically update for you.

Monday we displayed post counts. Well, what about taxonomies? That’s a little more complicated, I’m afraid.

Posts are easy. You pick a post type, you display the number of published posts, you walk away. Taxonomies though are a mixed bag. By default you have categories (category) and tags (post_tag) and inside them, you have terms. For example ‘Uncategorized’ is a category. The problem is that to check if a taxonomy exists (and display a post count), you have two have both the taxonomy name and the term name.

While you think you could just write a loop ‘If the term name isn’t in categories, it’s in tags!’ the reality is that anyone can add any taxonomy and, worse, term names aren’t unique. It’s ironic here, because I desperately wanted term names and slugs to not be unique. I wanted to have a tag for ‘random’ and a category for ‘random’ and they all have the same slug names. So here I am now, realizing I’ve set myself up for disaster.

The options are simple:

1. Force people to use term and taxonomy
2. Somehow be clever

I went with option 2. Allow people to use term and taxonomy, but if they don’t, find the first instance and go for it.

The Code

// [numtax term="term_slug" taxonomy="tax_slug"]
function numtax_shortcode( $atts ) {
	$attr = shortcode_atts( array(
		'term'     => '',
		'taxonomy' => '',
	), $atts );

	// Early Bailout
	if ( is_null($attr['term']) ) return "n/a";

	$the_term = sanitize_text_field( $attr['term'] );
	$all_taxonomies = ( empty( $attr['taxonomy'] ) )? get_taxonomies() : array( sanitize_text_field( $attr['taxonomy'] ) );

	//$all_taxonomies = get_taxonomies();
	foreach ( $all_taxonomies as $taxonomy ) {
	    $does_term_exist = term_exists( $the_term, $taxonomy );

	    if ( $does_term_exist !== 0 && $does_term_exist !== null ) {
		    $the_taxonomy = $taxonomy;
		    break;
	    } else {
		    $the_taxonomy = false;
	    }
	}

	// If no taxonomy, bail
	if ( $the_taxonomy == false ) return "n/a";

	$to_count = get_term_by( 'slug', $the_term, $the_taxonomy );

	return $to_count->count;

}
add_shortcode( 'numtax', 'numtax_shortcode' );

There are two moments where I bail out early. If they forgot to put in a term, display “N/A”. The same if we get all the way to the end and there was no found taxonomy.

Also if someone puts in a taxonomy, I treat it as an array in order to be lazy and not repeat myself. Good coding doesn’t repeat, so since I have to loop the array of found taxonomies in order to find the matchup, I may as well use it once to find the same data when I know what I have.

I admit, I was really excited here since I finally got to use ternary operations. I’ve known how they work for ages, but I never had a moment where it was so obvious to use them.

If you need a count of all your posts in WordPress, there’s a pretty handy function called wp_count_posts() for that.

For example, if you have a post-type of ‘characters’ and you wanted to show a count of that, you can do this:

$to_count = wp_count_posts( 'characters' );
printf( __('Total Characters: %s'), $count->publish );

And that’s all well and good, but I was working on some SEO thoughts. In doing so, I ran into the recommendation that, for a ‘company’ type page, having a list of your posts was a bad idea. This made sense. After all, a site that is about non-traditional blog content shouldn’t start with a blog.

To correct this, I restructured the front page to show, in order:

1. An introduction to the site
2. The 4 newest characters added
3. The 4 newest shows added
4. The latest 10 blog posts

This keeps the blog information visible (which helps show that content is being updated) but also doesn’t drop people into a cold open. They can understand why they’re on the site, what they’re getting, and where to go.

But part of telling people about the site meant I wanted to indicate the depth of information. When I used to run a MediaWiki site, I used {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} to list the number of articles. It was a very obvious way to display activity and attentiveness. If a site had 500 articles, it was probably getting up there. If it had 1500, it probably knew what it was doing.

That meant with WordPress what I wanted was a dynamic way to show the number of posts in a post type, like [numberofposts type="characters"] with the default being posts.

The Code

function numberofposts_shortcode( $atts ) {
	$attr = shortcode_atts( array(
		'type' => 'post',
	), $atts );

	$posttype = sanitize_text_field( $attr['type'] );
	if ( post_type_exists( $posttype ) !== true ) $posttype = 'post';

	$to_count = wp_count_posts( $posttype );

	return $to_count->publish;

}
add_shortcode( 'numberofposts', 'numberofposts_shortcode' );

What I chose to do here was check if the post type exists and, if not, force it to show posts. That way there will never be an error, though it may not show you what you expected if you put in ‘posts’ as your post type.