Hey, Jeff – fantastic question. We manage a few client sites hosted on WPE and love their service! However, we have not actually tried or tested this scenario with WPE + CDN (we’re only running single sites on there currently).
Here’s my gut theory (you should probably double-check with WPE support to make sure this will play out in practice). I think their CDN works transparently to themes and plugins, and (again, in theory) therefore it would not affect the actual values (URLs) stored in the database. Rather, it probably translates these values to their CDN equivalent locations on page render. So this theory 100% hinges on whether they actually update the URLs in the content and store the new URLs in the DB or translate on the fly. It could be verified fairly quickly by looking at the raw data for one of your sites in the DB and checking the URLs for images in posts and the like.
Another evidence to support the theory would be URLs and script includes in template files. They are offloading those to CDN through page render and naturally not by re-writing the actual template code.
So, IF this theory is sound the Cloner should work flawlessly because it does everything at the raw database level. Here’s what will likely happen in the entire lifecycle:
1) CDN translates URLs on the rendered Source site but URLs in the DB correspond to the site name / permalinks / etc. (for example: siteOne.com/wp-content/uploads/image.jpg)
2) Cloner copies Source (master) site to Target (clone) site at the DB level and replaces all old domains / paths with the correct new domains / paths in the clone site’s context (based on the names you put in before cloning).
3) CDN sees the URLs rendering on the new clone site as completely new assets and pushes them up to CDN and replaces the URLs only on the final rendered pages with a new unique URL (for example: siteTwo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/1.jpg is stored in the DB but saved to CDN and gets a new URL on render)
You can also always try it out and see what happens on a safe test case. With WPE snapshots this is a pretty low risk proposition.
Please let us know what you find! We are very curious to know if there are any quirks about running the Cloner in WPE with CDN.
Best!
NS
