WordPress was born as a blogging platform, and though it now easily tackles complex functions such as eCommerce, event management, and membership systems, among countless others, it still shines bright as an easy to use content management system for the masses. However, even though it comes out of the box pre-equipped with everything you need to create new posts, add images, and create and manage menus, there are some additional tools available through the free WordPress plugin repository that make things a bit more efficient, especially on sites with especially large amounts of content.
Duplicate Post
The functionality of Duplicate Post is so universally useful, it’s surprising that WordPress has not enabled it as part of their core. Over two million installations to date speaks to the plugin’s usefulness. The plugin does just as it says, it allows you to duplicate the content of any post type, and create a new post as a draft. There are some other options as well, but for most users the simple ‘clone’ link is all they need to get started.
Duplicate Menu
Just as with Duplicate Post above, Duplicate Menu allows you to duplicate any menu that you already have created and save as a copy. This can be extremely useful for sites with very complex and deep navigation structures, or simply as a backup utility if you are making changes to an existing menu. It is intuitive to use, and lightweight.
Enable Media Replace
If you work with lots of files in your media library, whether images, pdfs, or other documents, and are regularly changing the version, Enable Media Replace can save you a lot of time and keep things much more organized. There are a number of document and version control plugins available, but especially if you only need concern yourself with the latest version of a media item, this plugin allows you to switch it out with one simple step, and will automatically update the links for all pages on the site either with the same link, or new generated link.
Bulk Page Creator
First, a disclaimer on Bulk Page Creator: It has not been updated in 2 years as of this writing. Very rarely would we recommend a plugin which has not been updated in that long, but in this case, it really does provide the most straight forward and efficient way to accomplish just what the plugin name implies – bulk creation of pages. It’s a very simple interface, but makes it a breeze to add a bunch of page names at once, choosing the page parent as well as the post status. On sites with very large page sitemaps, this can literally save hours of your time. We haven’t run into any compatibility issues with this plugin on the latest WordPress version, and it has significantly more active installations than the other options. However, since it isn’t actively supported, we recommend removing it from your WordPress installation when you are finished using it. If we find a better plugin for this task, we will be sure to update this post. In the mean time, here are a few which are more recently updated but aren’t quite as useful in our experience: Mass Pages/Posts Creator, Page Generator.
As with any plugin installation, you should always work with your development team to put any of this functionality in place, as even relatively simple plugins like the ones featured here can lead to unexpected compatibility issues. Please contact us if you are looking to speed up your content management efficiency with any of the above tools, or if you have any other functions you’d like to add which could help. Chances are there is a plugin that can help, and if not, we can always create a new one for you!
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