Wordpress Cloner Plugin To Manage Multiple Blogs

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Blog Automation Tools

“CTRL+C for your Wordpress Blog” – I love that tagline!

If you have multiple Wordpress blogs, you’d probably know by now that managing all of them at a time can be a total pain in the ass.

The headache comes when you need to install a new theme or plugin to all your blogs. It becomes even harder if those themes or plugins need to be modified or adjusted in a certain way.

WP Cloner (not to be confused with “Wordpress Cloner” by Mike Filsaime) is software from Anthony Ellis that allows you to manage multiple Wordpress blogs by “cloning” one blog’s setting to an unlimited amount of other blogs.

Anthony Ellis is also responsible for several innovative Wordpress hacks and plugins, including Auto Social Poster that allows you to submit links to multiple social bookmarking sites automatically.

WP Cloner is a Wordpress plugin, and installing it is as easy as any other Wordpress plugin. It’s obviously a labor of love, and I encountered no weird error message throughout my process of using it.

What you need to do is:

Install WP Cloner on the source blog
Enter the admin login and password for all your other blogs
Select what you want to copy, and click on “Start”
The cloning report will be emailed to you
Repeat again as much as necessary!

You can choose to copy:

Your plugins and it’s settings / data
Your Wordpress themes
Your permalinks structure & general settings
Any static pages on your site, for example you “Contact Us” page
Your categories, posts and comments
Your blogroll and links
Your admin username / data

WARNING: If you’ve previously modified your Wordpress themes for individual blogs, make sure you back it all up as you may overwrite them when using the Wp Cloner plugin.

There are a few other tools in the market to manage multiple Wordpress blog, but these require you to upload / manage multiple sites via an admin interface. In fact Anthony Ellis has a tool called Mass Account Manager that you can also use to maintain multiple Cpanels and mass upload files to your server.

WP Cloner is $127 and comes with an unlimited blog license. This means that you can install the plugin on as many blogs as you own without having to purchase additional licenses.

It’s extremely useful for anyone with a small to medium sized blog network, but if you have just a few Wordpress blogs this may not be absolutely vital for you.

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