Add Clone Sites for WPMU (batch)

Description

With this plugin you can simply batch create / add a bunch of sites to your WPMU install (WordPress Network) and use one of your existing sites as a template for the new sites. The existing blog will be cloned exactly including posts, layout, settings, etc. The plugin also takes care of domainmapping the newly created sites. (depends on ‘WordPress MU Domain Mapping’ by Donncha to be installed)

This plugin will save you a lot of time.
Even adding one site is faster with this pluging compared to the normal way: add site, domainmap it, set everything up.

Update: You can now also use it without domainmapping, so just cloning sites in a batch! Insert the name of the subdir or subdomain you want to make in the place of the url.

Installation

1. Install the plugin in the usual way into the WordPress plugins folder.
2. Network activate the plugin (it has only effect on the network admin area, so it is safe to network activate.

That’s it. Now you can go to the Network Admin area and there you will see the plugin in the sites menu

The preferred workflow is as follows:

After setting up a WordPress network based on subdomains and installing and activating ‘WordPress MU Domain Mapping’ by Donncha and this plugin you are good to go.

1. First you need a template site setup to clone.
2. Add a new site, set it up completely with plugins, themes, posts, etc.
3. I suggest you give the sitename a prefix like tmp-, for example ‘tmp-foobarsites’. This will make it easyer for you to recognise the template sites from the normal sites. Also, in a future release of this plugin filtering on a prefix will be supported.
4. prepare a textfile / excel file with the url’s, blognames, and blogdescriptions you want to create. Use the format: “new_site_url, site_description, site_name”. If you leave the site_name empty, it will take the url as the sitename. Don’t use https:// and think if you want the site to use the prefix www. or not.
5. Go to the Network Admin area and click on add clone sites in the sites menu.
6. choose your template site from the dropdown list and select a admin user for the domains.
7. copy paste the prepared textfile in the field and hit clone.
8. That’s it, just wait till it is finished.
9. After saving so much time for you, make sure you buy me a coffee!

FAQ

Where can I find the plugin after activation?

You can find it in the Network Admin area in the Sites Menu.

It gives an error on domainmapping

Because this plugin safes you time adding sites by cloning a template AND domainmapping them in one batch, this plugin depends on the ‘WordPress MU Domain Mapping’ plugin by Donncha. In order to make the domainmapping plugin work you might need to log out and in again after installing it.

Why can’t I clone the main site?

I chose not to because the main site can be slightly different in structure than a new network site.
Therefore the plugin is not looking for the main site in the template selection.
Make a new site manually first, edit it to your whishing (no domainmapping required), and use that site as a template to clone.

Tip: give the template site a distinctive name by giving it a prefix. For example: ‘tmp-foobarsites’.
Selecting on prefixes like ‘tmp-‘ will be a future feature of this plugin.

It doensn’t work

Please mention this on my pluginpage, so I can have a look at it.

How does it handle links to images in posts from the template?

You can now choose to copy all images and uploads from the template. Not that this will have impact on your hosting diskspace depending on how many uploads and clones you make.

Reviews

Kinda Crazy…

graphicpoet March 11, 2019

It’s 2019 and I found a slightly altered version of this, from someone out there and it still works!!

Add Clone Sites for WPMU (batch) Review

David Cameron Law September 3, 2016

I’ve been using the Add Clone Sites for WPMU (batch) plugin (updated 4 years ago) for several years (at least 3 years) along with the WordPress MU Domain Mapping (updated 1 yr ago). I have 8 installs of the above two plugins running about 80 domains between them, so if this broke I’d be in big trouble. Even though these two plugins aren’t updated on a regular basis I’ve had no issues as I’ve upgraded through various versions of WordPress (a lot of major WordPress updates). It’s a bit of a pain to setup, domain mapping isn’t a simple process, but when setup it works well. Rather than updating 80 sites one at a time I update 8 domain mapped installs, saves me LOADS of time. Well deserving of a 5 star review. David Law

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

0.8.4.2

• Minor bugfix in jquery code which stopped the buttons from showing up

0.8.4.1

• Stopped logging for development purposes, due to too much spam

0.8.4

• Made it possible to just batch clone without using domainmapping. So no valid new url is needed.
• Added the option to copy images and uploads from the template to the new blogs (note that this will take up extra space on your account!)

0.8.3

• Minor change: renamed some functions in order not to collide with functions of other plugins.
• Fixed duplicity check, in some cases you could make sites with the same url..

0.8.2

• Added support for subdirectory installs, now both subdomain as well as subdirectory network installs will work.
• Changed the urls of the sites back to wp network urls (https://site.maindomain.com or https://maindomain.com/site) in stead of using its domainmapped urls.

0.8.1

• This is the first stable version, sorry due to wrong links it did not work properly…
• WordPress made a different directory for the plugin which made links to css and javascript files fail. Now fixed.

0.8

• The first ‘stable’ version to be released public
• Added permalink updating (permalinks did only work after viewing the permalinks settings in the dashboard)
• Added nice graphics