What ever happened to duplicating an existing site via MSM in EE 3.x?

Hi Marshall,

It was removed as when we started building out ExpressionEngine 3, we discovered that the feature wasn’t working as intended or expected and was in some rare cases orphaning data. We found that it was an edge case feature not being used by a very large portion of our customer base, so the hard decision to remove it for 3 was made.

Currently there isn’t an alternate way to duplicate a site in MSM.

Ag! Killing me. Do you know of a clever way to do it via the backend? I just purchased a license with the sole intent to make a clone of our production EE instance for our staging instance just as we do for EE 2.x.

Hi Marshall,

Could you not just copy the DB wholesale if you are making a clone of a ExpressionEngine installation for stagin/dev purposes?

That’s what I do when I set up staging and dev for myself.

Kinda. Would work if I had a separate EE instance and not using MSM. But in this case I’m using MSM and it appears I just spent $200 for no reason…

Hi Marshall,

I might be misunderstanding. Why would you want to dev/stage a single MSM site without dev/staging the entire install?

MSM extends ExpressionEngine it doesn’t create stand alone sites.

@James for the sake of simplicity. Over the years I have used MSM to both Extend EE and create stand alone sites. The power behind it is the single sign-on for multipule sites so one wouldn’t have to have a whole new single instance install.

So, in the past I’ve used it to clone over data/entries from production on to a dev site so we have some real data to mess with for future updates and found it a quick and dirty route to create a dev site that is a clone of a prod site.

I know its backwards, but I find myself often creating the live site first, then flipping the “on” switch will all content fully loaded, then creating a dev/staging site to test any future update so we don’t impact prod.

I’m sorry to see the feature removed also. I had hoped to use it to clone the basic structure of an existing site and just add new content. I ended up copying templates and channels manually.

EE 3 has Channel Sets so you can export it from site A and import it into site B. Copying templates is a breeze as well.

can you post some detail on how you copy templates from one site to another within MSM?

Templates? Just go to your templates folder system/user/templates, and each site will be a different folder. You can then just copy from one folder to the next as you wish!

Hope this helps!

Ahh, now I see what you mean.

I hadn’t saved my templates as files. So I changed that setting and then copied the template group folders to the new site’s folder. It took only a few minutes.

Great solution!