How to insert PHP code into widgets?

As you’ve found, you can’t add PHP code through HTML blocks.

To add that, you would need to create your own widget code, and add it to a child theme or a custom plugin. If you don’t have the ability to do that you really should look at a plugin that can do this as it’s really going to do what you want with pretty much the same sort of coding, just done by someone else.

The Custom HTML block is for HTML, not PHP ?? As you’ve discovered. You could develop your own classic widget, or a shortcode which you can add to other content, or your own custom block which can be used as a widget.

In case someone else wanted to achieve the same result as me, this is how I achieved it ??

@assist7833 gave an answer in this thread (that is deleted now) but it worked perfectly

in functions.php of my child theme I added the following code with few tweaks replacing “Footer Area” with the actual text I want rendered there:

function custom_footer_year() {
    ob_start();
    echo '©' . date('Y') . ' Footer Area';
    return ob_get_clean();
}
add_shortcode('footer_year', 'custom_footer_year');

and then inside the footer widget I created, instead of the PHP code to display the current year for the copyright validity, I put this shortcode

[footer_year]

Thank you also to @catacaustic for the suggestions and thanks for the links @bcworkz