How to Clone a Story

You can clone a story in Composer. Cloning creates an independent copy of an article for you to work with.

To clone a story, click Clone from the story's Action menu. When you click Clone, Composer gives you the option to rename your clone and update the primary website. After confirming your details, you will be redirected to the clone you created.

The clone is a new, unpublished copy of the story, including the body copy and any key metadata (Planning tab items, circulations, tags, distributor fields, featured media, etc.). You now have two separate files—original and clone—and changes made to either of them do not reflect back on the other. If you don't want the circulations to be cloned, you select the Omit when cloning check box under the Circulate options in Composer Settings.

You can identify originals and clones by the information at the top of the screen in the Left Details pane If you're viewing a clone, the article displays “This story was cloned from XXX (clone)" or “This story was cloned to create XXX (original)" along with a link to the clone or the original.

How is it implemented? 

When you clone a story, the system calls a save on both the current story and the cloned story. The system then redirects you to the new, cloned story.

Because the lock process relinquishes a lock when you navigate away from a story, you lose the lock for the original story when cloning and acquire a new one for the copy with a reset idle/save timer. You must navigate back to the original story to regain a lock on that article.

References to related clone parent and children are listed on the story as a property under related content, either clonedFromParent or clonedChildren. The UI build process references these when creating the cloned to/from links at the top of the page:

"related_content":{
  "basic": [],
  "redirect": [],
  "clonedFromParent": [],
  "clonedChildren": [
    {
      "type": "reference",
      "referent":{
        "id": "LGPIX6DI65B4NFZ2RE6FGUT2FU"
      }
    }
  ]
}

If you delete a story and it's related to another story due to the clone process, the related to/from links persist on the remaining story, and if clicked, result in a “story not found” page.

Cloning a story does not migrate any date information on the clone and does not automatically publish, send to print, or alter the workflow status of the clone. Cloning merely copies the content and settings from one story, creates a new story, and applies that content to the new story. In the API, the only way a parent and clone are related is through the related content properties. The following attributes of the parent are removed from the clone:

created_date
display_date
last_updated_date
publish_date
first_publish_date
canonical_url
has_published_copy
is_published
publish_date

Additionally, the new clone does not retain the revision history from its parent. The clone is a new story, and revision, publish, and print history proceed on a new, independent timeline.