After 2009 rolled in and all our sites failed to follow suit because  “someone” hard-coded the years — but only up to 2008 — I quickly had to write something a bit more — well, smart.

I needed an HTML drop-down box with a set of years starting from a fixed year, but extending to the current year so that it would always be up-to-date and I wouldn’t have to run around updating reams of HTML each year.

I have assigned the year from which to begin as $INCEPTION_DATE. To get the current year, which will be the top of the range (we don’t need future dates), you simply use the PHP date function like so: date('Y'). Then simply iterate through the years. I have also set the drop-down box so that the current year will be selected by default.

$INCEPTION_DATE = 2008;
$current_year = date('Y');
for($c = $INCEPTION_DATE; $c <= $current_year; $c++) {
    $sel = ($current_year == $c) ? 'selected="selected"' : '';
    echo '<option value="'.$c.'" '.$sel.'>'.$c.'</option>';
}

A little bit of forward-thinking can save a whole lot of time!