What has cloning ever done for us?

Asked by: Fuzzy Duck, Ducky Fuzz and the other one

Coming up to five years ago I published my requirements for cloning content between sites. One of the planned enhancements was to support pull cloning. ie. Pulling updated content back from a slave server to the local system, providing the same content cloning functionality as for push cloning, including attachments.

I’m going on holiday to New Zealand fairly soon. I won’t be taking my laptop. I want to be able to import any changes I make on my websites back to my development machine.

Back in June 2019, when I first started writing this post, I developed a batch interface to support push, pull and reconciliation. Then I got sidelined with Do Not Clone logic to cater for posts that get cloned both between subdomains and local and slave servers.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve written a new Slave tab for the oik options > Clone admin page. I think I’ve nearly cracked it. It even seems to work for attachments. I can Import, Pull, Push and Clone content, including re-usable blocks.

Now I’m going to find out if it really does work. Fingers crossed. I’ve packaged a new version of the plugin as v2.0.0-beta-20200127. I don’t think I need to install the plugin on my servers since the changes apply to my local development. But I might as well.

Wish me luck! PS. I will be taking backups before I do anything too drastic.