New feature: duplicate your site and create your own templates

Submitted by Linea on July 22, 2010 - 12:24pm

Drupal Gardens was upgraded yesterday and one of the exciting features you'll see is a Site duplication feature. You can build a site, duplicate it, and use the copy as a starting place for a new site. The duplicated site will have your theme and all your saved themes, your modules, and settings. Users who have the Site owner or Administration roles will be copied, along with the content they created.

Back when Drupal Gardens was still on the whiteboard, this was one of the features we thought would be great. Users agreed and it's been on the most requested features list for months. Being able to duplicate a site will save people days of work and give them a way to have consistent theme and branding across a large set of themes.

People are getting clever with how they'll use this feature. Here are a couple of stories from our beta testers:

The web team at a large university is flooded with requests for new sites. They'll create a set of site templates (faculty site, event site, project site) that have the university's branding and standard header and footer. Then they'll duplicate the relevant template each time someone needs a new site. This will save them days of work.

A web designer spends most of her time on large projects, but gets tons of requests from clients with small budgets. To make these small projects profitable, she'll let her clients select from a set of pre-designed themes. She'll duplicate the site that has the selected theme, use the copied site as a template, customize it a bit - and voila! The designer spends hours, not days, on the project and her client gets an affordable site. Everyone's happy.

To duplicate your site, go to your My sites page and click on the Actions link next to your site.