The emergence of WordPress Cloning Software recently has piqued my interest, and I’ve tested a couple of the frontrunners so far, EZ WP Cloner Plugin and WPTwin. You can see the results for yourself on those posts.

Why would you want to clone a WordPress blog? One obvious reason would be to have a fully functional duplicate of your blog for back-up. Located on a different domain and webhosting service, it could sit there until needed, like if a mishap were to befall the original. While hosting services and WordPress itself have back-up capabilities, creating one of a complete WordPress blog, with all its intricate scripts, plus all of your add-ons, plugins, files, etc. is a daunting chore. Then there’s the database, which requires additional complicated steps.

With cloning technology it’s relatively easy to do everything in a few steps. With one or more clones of your blog sitting on other servers, if something awful were to happen to your original, in theory it should be a simple matter of installing a new WP blog there, then cloning one of the clones back to it. Alternatively, you could change the DNS of your domain to point to the cloned blog.

But I think WordPress cloning software has greater potential in a slightly different way.

Let’s say you found the perfect WP theme. Perhaps you’ve used a software program like Artisteer to create something totally unique to you, or paid to have a custom theme created for you. You’ve taken all the time needed to install, activate and configure several, even numerous, plugins and done other customizations. You’ve created it to be a recognizable “brand” – to uniquely represent you or your company.

You want to take everything with you as you set up new blogs around the internet, but you can’t. With each new WP installation, you have to do it all over again. You’ve got the theme and the plugins, but they all have to be re-uploaded, re-installed, re-activated and re-configured – every time.

WordPress cloning software could be used to let you set up just one “skeleton” blog, with everything installed and configured, including all elements, pages, logos, images and everything you want to be common to all your blogs. Then you could just clone that skeleton, in full working order, to wherever you want, as many times as you need. The only thing left to do with each new blog is start adding your content.

I haven’t tried this yet, but my little gray cells are jumping around excitedly in my brain pan.

I’ve been continuing my testing of WordPress Cloning Software by taking a look at WPTwin. This product is not a plugin, as is EZ WP Cloner. This software consists of two .php scripts that you run independently of one another on two servers. The first script runs on the server where the blog that you wish to clone is located. It creates the clone.

The second script runs on the server where the clone of your blog will be located. This script installs the clone at that location.

I ran four tests on WPTwin to clone a blog from one domain on one webhost (“subject”) to four other domains on four other hosts (“targets”). Two worked perfectly, one required a minor adjustment but worked, and one failed entirely.

After looking over the documentation for the software, and for the target hosting services where the cloning didn’t work perfectly or failed, I’m convinced the fault is not with the software or scripts. I don’t believe the programmers could possibly have tested the software at every hosting service on the planet. I do think, though, that if they are made aware of the failures, they may be able to make adjustments.

The subject blog is hosted on Bluehost. The target hosts were Hostgator, Hostmonster, Lunarpages and Bullfrog. The failure involved Bullfrog, which uses security measures to prevent the running of certain types of scripts. The script’s error page did actually offer two possible solutions, one of which is a risky workaround and the other involving asking the hosting service to configure their servers to allow the script. I did not do either.

The cloning attempt at Lunarpages resulted in an initial error which I corrected, as suggested by the software itself, by creating a simple .htaccess file (the exact code was provided on the error report) and uploading it to the folder. It took all of 2 minutes, and the clone took perfectly.

Hostgator and Hostmonster presented no problems at all. The entire process took an average of about 20 minutes. Most of the time involved the downloading and uploading of the clone file from the subject host to the target host, and the few minutes it took to create a WordPress installation at the target host, which is required for everything to work.

It should be noted that the blog I cloned was not large or complex. The clone file that had to be downloaded and uploaded was about 25MB in size. A very large blog, with hundreds of posts, comments, categories, pages, plugins, video and audio files, etc. would be much larger, and it would therefore take much longer to complete the cloning.

The video below is a quick runthrough of the basic process using Hostgator as the target host for the clone. It was my second attempt at cloning, done on-the-fly after the first attempt failed at Bullfrog.

So far I’ve only tested these two WordPress Cloning Software products, and WPTwin is clearly the one I would recommend at this point. You can review it for yourself by visiting the WPTwin Website.

There have been some recent product developments in WordPress Cloning Software. As someone who likes to try new software, I thought I’d write a little about what I’ve learned.

The first product I tried is named EZ WP Cloner Plugin. As the name implies, it is a WordPress plugin – a single .php file that you upload into your wp-content/plugins folder. Once activated, it presents a screen with text boxes into which you enter the FTP information for the location at which you want your cloned blog to be installed.

It’s pretty straightforward, actually, and should work. However, my first attempt to clone this blog became an excruciating exercise in patience, and I finally gave up. The problem, in this case, was that the plugin will create a backup .zip file of the entire contents of the folder in which the blog is located. In this case, it was attempting to create a backup of a folder containing almost 1GB of files, including videos, audio files, other .zip files and additional software and scripts. After waiting almost three hours with the job undone, I stopped. I have no idea how long it might have taken.

My second attempt also failed. I chose a far smaller and less complex blog to clone. After installing and activating the plugin there, and filling out the FTP details, I hit the “Clone” button, and in a few minutes the job was done. That was much better! However, when I went to the new location to view the newly cloned blog, only the front page worked. Any links clicked on turned up 404 Not Found pages. Trying to log in to wp-admin was unsuccessful, as there was no wp-admin page to be found. Nothing worked at the cloned blog site.

EZ WP Cloner Plugin carried a $47 price tag, and I felt it was money wasted. I did get a prompt refund, and was told that an update to the plugin would solve known issues. So far, though, I have not received word of the update being available. If and when it is, I’ll try again and report my findings here.

In the meantime I am not recommending this product.

Update January 11, 2011

I got my hands on the updated version of EZ WP Cloner last week, and have attempted three cloning jobs using it. I’m sad to say it didn’t work any better than the original (which didn’t work at all). In fact, in two of the three tries, not even the front page was cloned.

I read somewhere in the WordPress Codex about permalink structures and how they may affect such things as installing or re-installing backups, and it’s possible that my permalink structure might be affecting EZ WP Cloner’s operation. But I’m not going to change my permalinks for the sake of a software, especially when the other program I’ve used, WPTwin, does work well for me.

It should also be noted that a user who had success with EZ WP Cloner did so on a dedicated server, not on a shared hosting account, as most people use, including myself.