custom_copyright tag

In the footer of almost all websites you will find a copyright notice, followed by the start year and the current year.
In CMS Made Simple there is a User Defined Tag (UDT) which automatically creates those dates. By default the start year is set to 2004 (the birth of CMSMS)

You can change the value of the startyear at:
Extentions >> User Defined Tags
Name: custom_copyright
Description: Code to output copyright information

//set start to date your site was published
$startCopyRight='2004';

// check if start year is this year
if(date('Y') == $startCopyRight){
// it was, just print this year
    echo $startCopyRight;
}else{
// it wasnt, print startyear and this year delimited with a dash
    echo $startCopyRight.'-'. date('Y');
}