In the good old days, you were able to duplicate posts in WordPress. It was built right into the CMS and made writing new landing pages and templated posts a breeze. It also helped new editors learn our styles and page structures more quickly. It really was grand. For some reason, this functionality went away. Thankfully, I’ve stumbled upon a new plugin that brings this functionality back and makes it even better.
The plugin is aptly called Duplicate Post and it lets you do just that—duplicate a post or page. You can even create a new draft of a post. With one click of the button you’re back in post editor ready to write.
For the record, the plugin uses the terminology “clone” instead of duplicate. Below is an image of how Duplicate Post integrates with your lists of posts. It makes itself very handy. The plugin also has a special preference page where you can set duplicate to copy the same date, meta data, original post status and excerpt from the original post. The preferences even allow you to set which user set has the ability to use the duplicate post feature, because sometimes you don’t want kids playing with the new toys.
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One great use of the plugin is for testing content. Pippin Williamson from WPMods says, “The plugin is designed to give you a really easy way to duplicate an already-written post and copy it over to a new post. So, instead of writing 5-10 posts by hand, you write one, then duplicate it 5-10 times.” Populating a new site with test content now takes minutes instead of hours.
The plugin will save you a ton of time and I think it’s a must for any publisher. Do you use the Duplicate Post Plugin? Has it saved you time? Let me know by posting a comment.
