CUNY Academic Commons

I don't anticipate usage being so heavy yet as to justify building our own front end. Primarily thinking about faculty members who have selected themes, plugins, and structured ia and menus being able to duplicate this to fresh spaces.

I'd be happy to manage the cloning process, if you feel it's safe to roll out. Alternatively, perhaps we can scope out a new role for members of the Community Team with some Super Admin features that might allow use of a tool like this (and also facilitate some of the user management requests that occasionally come in).

Sure, this makes it easier. Do you envision having a public, official way to request a clone? Perhaps a line in our documentation (either on the Help site or on the site creation page) suggesting that they send an email to a certain person, or submit a Zendesk ticket? Or will this be secret-menu only?

I think we should establish a) if we should do this and b) how smooth the process is and how much troubleshooting it might require before answering that question. If smooth, then integrating into the documentation would be great. If more challenging, then it could be off menu, members only special sauce.

I'll put the plugin onto the Commons for this release, and we can run some tests to see how it works.

Checking in on this... was there a hiccup on testing or are we holding off for another reason? If possible, would be great to deploy in next release so we can make it available to those teaching on the Commons this fall (in a limited capacity).

Happy to help with testing, if needed.

No hiccup, I just haven't had time to give this the thorough look that it needs before I feel confident with it. The plugin is on the production site. If you want to try it, you may. Otherwise, I've slated some time later this week to look more closely at it myself. Sorry for the delay.

No worries, but confirming: I'm clear to network activate this on the Commons to run a test? would you rather give it a run in the dev environment, or are you confident it's safe?

Documenting here...

Here's report on most recent successful clone:

3008
Old Site:
https://anderstsp2017.commons.gc.cuny.edu
New Site ID:
3337
New Site:
https://qccdocumentaryfall2017.commons.gc.cuny.edu
Tables cloned:
11
Replacements made:
365
Files/directories copied:
136
Total process time:
6.5443 seconds
Log file:
logs/ns-cloner-20170824-122918.html

Clone threw these permission errors: https://pastebin.com/DBJ5hcg4

I accessed this clone via https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/network/admin.php?page=ns-cloner, though one can also clone a site via https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/network/sites.php. The second route, however, does not allow you to select a new site name (appends "-2" to original site name).

The first clone I tried (accessed via NS-Cloner interface), but then I did a couple of successful ones via /sites.php. The one reported above was via NS-Cloner interface.

Could use some more robust testing, which I can do when I'm back from my time away. In the meantime, Marilyn should know we have this functionality in case folks ask for it... adding Stephen and Marilyn as watchers.

I had a chance to use the NS Cloner plugin for #9346 and can verify Luke's assessment in comment 14.

When cloning, we'll most likely want to customize the new subdomain, so to do that, use the "Network Admin > NS Cloner" page.

We should not use the "Clone" functionality located on the "Network Admin > Sites" page. We should probably look to remove the "Clone" links from that page to avoid confusion.