Just finished reading a good post on Lorelle on WordPress about checking dates on your blog.
Here’s an easy way to make copyright notices in WordPress “eternal”, so you don’t have to update them every year.
In your WordPress theme, if you see a hard coded year, such as 2012, replace it with this:
<?php echo date('Y') ?>
What this code does is echoes (or prints on screen) the result of the date function in PHP, which in parenthesis is formatted. WordPress runs on PHP, which is a web scripting language.
Don’t insert this code in your posts though, because it will probably just display the code and not work.