I want to clone
I write a number of blog posts that are often very similar – for example I write up the five songs my iPod played to me on shuffle each morning in a feature called 5Tracks.
I also put video and photos on the site through a post instead of just embedding them in the template or updating a post as this way I can create a sort of video log and photo log.
The thing is though – the vast majority of items on the 5Tracks posts, the video posts, the photos and a number of other articles I write are identical – they change very little.
If I’m writing a piece about Doctor Who the related links, tags and even the images are going to be pretty similar – it’s only the bulk of the content that’s going to change.
Zemanta goes some way to helping with this as it provides me with a mass of content that’s really easy to emmbedd but it can’t help with articles that are almost identical (like 5tracks).
There are elements within the 5tracks post that stay there all the time – the description at the bottom of the page, the related links, the layout and a banner across the top of every post (this is for formatting on my blog homepage).
At the moment I open the last 5tracks post to edit, copy the contents of the Post box to my clipboard, start a new blog post and paste the contents of the clipboard into the new Post box.
I then go back and copy the Thumbnail link (this theme uses a Custom Field to generate a Thumbnail to display the post on the blog homepage), a few tags and related links.
What I really want is a way to make this whole process a lot easier. It would be great if I had an option to ‘clone’ a previous post.
This could take the form of a button on a post page – so I open the last 5tracks post, push the clone button and it creates a whole new post with a whole new ID but with all the same content – I can then just go and change the text.
So the question I’ve got really is ‘is this possible?’ and if it is on a scale of 1-10 what level of coding ability would I need to create it?
If it’s anything above 3 is there anyone else that’s a better coder that might also want this feature who could help me?
A clone option is available within the BBC News & Sport CPS and it saves a massive amount of time when creating similar articles. I’d like that functionality within WordPress.
Photo credits for this post go to ‘Clones in the Castle‘, a project in self replication by Kaptain Kobold and ‘Clone Troopers‘ , gotta love those guys by Fanboy30 all photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.
Ryan, this might work for you:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicate-post/
Sounds like it does what you need it to do.
Ryan – that’s exactly what I was looking for – thanks. If I combine that with the plugin Viper007Bond (owner of FinalGear and brilliant plugin maker) created for me my WordPress Workflow is going to get a lot quicker and easier.
The plugin from Viper007Bond basically lets me pre-define a block of code or text that can then be pulled into a post with the click of a button.
http://forums.finalgear.com/technology/wordpress-help-26957/
Glad to be of service!