Two interesting plugins to simplify your editorial process

Jun 5, 2015 12:12 GMT  ·  By
The Clone Posts plugin adds a simple "Clone" link to post/page listings
4 photos
   The Clone Posts plugin adds a simple "Clone" link to post/page listings

Not all content on the Web is unique, and sometimes articles, news, freebies, or blog posts tend to have a repetitive pattern, in which case there's a lot of copy & paste involved.

For this kind of situations, there are a few WordPress plugins that can make life easier for editors, allowing them to duplicate posts, make the few changes they need, quickly publishing their content without moving text manually from one article to another.

Depending on what you need, two main plugins stand out: Clone Posts and Duplicate Post.

Clone Posts provides just the raw "Clone" controls

The simpler of the two is Clone Posts, which doesn't even have an options page. You just install it, and you're good to go.

By default it will add a "Clone" link on all post, page, and custom post type listings (index pages), which when clicked will copy that item, also saving it as a draft to avoid duplicate content on the frontend.

If you want more options, install Duplicate Post

On the other hand, the Duplicate Post plugin is a much more complete solution, providing a deeper level of integration, appearing not only on the index pages, but also while editing the posts or pages.

The controls added to the post are "Clone" and "New Draft." The "Clone" link doesn't work the same as with the Clone Posts plugin, literally duplicating the article and its content, saving it, and publishing on the frontend.

This can get quite messy on a production-ready website, and using "New Draft" is a better option. In its case, the duplicated items will not go live until an editor publishes them by hand, after making the appropriate changes.

Duplicate Post also adds a "Copy to a new draft" link to the "Publish" section while editing a page, and to the admin bar when viewing a page or blog post on the site's frontend.

On top of this, there's also a quite extensive settings page in the WordPress backend, where administrators can fine-tune the plugin's behavior for various circumstances.

Some of the available settings can force the plugin to copy the post/page date instead of using the current time, copy the article's editorial status, its excerpt, attachments, and children pages, if any.

Post taxonomies are all copied automatically by default, but this can be prevented by unchecking some options.

Administrators can also add automatic prefixes and suffixes to cloned items, along with preventing lower level users from seeing the duplication controls.

Duplicate Post also adds cloning controls to the editing section
Duplicate Post also adds cloning controls to the editing section

Cloning posts and pages is just a one-click operation (4 Images)

The Clone Posts plugin adds a simple "Clone" link to post/page listings
The Duplicate Post plugin, on the other hand, has a few more optionsDuplicate Post also adds cloning controls to the editing section
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