This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Description

In WordPress Multisite, new sites get a boring default template, without any custom settings or starter content.

This plugin allows you to select a specific blog on your network, a โ€œmasterโ€ one, that will be cloned every time a new blog is created.

In this way, new blogs will contain all posts, uploads, theme settings and plugin options from the master blog.

How does it work?

  1. It uses MySQL INSERT INTO ... SELECT to copy every table from the โ€œmasterโ€ blog into the new one. This is fast!
  2. Then it does a search and replace on the new blog’s tables, to replace the old URL with the new one.
    This is done in a way that respects serialized arrays, so your plugin’s settings will be preserved.
    (We used a heavily trimmed down version of Interconnect/IT’s Search and Replace tool for that, so go thank them for this!)
  3. It proceeds to copy all files from the wp-content/uploads dir of your master blog into the new one’s, so that all assets will work as expected.
  4. Finally it does some house clean-up, updating the new blog’s title, admin email, and user roles as needed.

Go check the screenshots, it’s really simple and does what it says.
Give it a try!

This plugin was handcrafted with love and โ€˜yerba mateโ€™ by the team at Tipit.net.

Screenshots

  • Select a default site. It will be cloned when any new site is created.

  • Clone any site. From the Sites list, admins can easily clone any site in the Network.

Installation

  1. Upload multisite-cloner to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  2. Network-activate the plugin through the โ€˜Pluginsโ€™ menu in your Network admin.
  3. In your Network admin, go to Settings > Multisite Cloner

You’ll probably want to create a โ€œmasterโ€ blog to clone from, if you don’t have one already.

FAQ

Can I clone the main site?

No. The main site in your network (usually the one with ID = 1) contains many DB tables, assets and even sensitive information that shouldn’t be replicated to other blogs.

Can I clone my blog in a single-site WP install?

No. The whole point of this plugin is to clone blogs within a Multisite network.

Really?

We couldn’t come up with more questions. Go ahead and ask us some questions and we’ll add the frequent ones here ๐Ÿ™‚

Reviews

๐ŸŒธ5๏ธโƒฃ 6, 2020
The best plugin for multisite blog cloning. Everything works, the most important thing is that it copies all users, unlike other similar plugins.
July 27, 2018 1 reply
This plugin has never let me down and I’ve used it on scores of multi-sites. I know (at the time of writing this review) it has not been updated in a while, but it’s still brilliant. The developer has said he will update when required, so don’t be put off by the last update date. Plus he responds to support questions. What more can you ask for. Thank you @manuelrazzari
Read all 29 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Multisite Cloner” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Multisite Cloner” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

0.2.2.1

  • Fixed syntax error introduced in 0.2.2. (Props to @infotexsupport for reporting this.)
  • Settings dropdown: include site path, set max-width.

0.2.2

  • WP 4.6 compat: use get_sites and get_network. (Props to @dima-stefantsov for reporting this.)
  • Fixed a bug with unserialized object cloning (Props to @icryptic, @techiechic, @t2m and @dberdal for reporting it, and thanks to @interconnectit for the actual fix!)

0.2.1

  • Bug fix: when โ€œAllow new registrationsโ€ is enabled and a user activates a new blog from the front-end, the wrong footer would be displayed on wp-activate.php. Thanks to Schalk Joubert who insisted on this bug.
  • Minor UI tweaks to Settings
  • Tested and updated WP version support.

0.2.0

0.1.13

  • Disable cloning of the Main blog from the All Sites network admin.

0.1.12

0.1.11.1

0.1.11

0.1.10

  • This version works with the latest WordPress release (WordPress 4.0.0)

0.1.9

  • Bug fix: Images in post were linked to the original blog.

0.1.8

0.1.7.1

0.1.7

  • The plugin now works on directory-based installs (Fixes problem with duplicate file path reported by JigMedia)
  • Handle case of new networks that still haven’t created any sites to clone from.

0.1.6

0.1.5

0.1.4

  • First public release.
  • Disabled cloning of the main site in the network. Risky stuff.
  • Added โ€œDolly The Clonerโ€ graphic by rock-star designer Diana Stilinovic.

0.1.3

  • Added settings page.
  • Added shortcut to clone any blog in the network.
  • Refactored into a plugin class.
  • Refactored DB replacer to use wpdb functions instead of obsolete mysql_* calls.

0.1.2

  • Replaced calls to functionality in the underlying OS (mysql, sed) with raw SQL, for greater portability.

0.1.1

  • Initial version, on a client site.