Cloning Best Practices on Columbia Finance Sites
This training guide contains instructions detailing cloning best practices on Columbia Finance Sites.
Last Revision: July 2023
What is cloning?
Cloning content items on Columbia Sites can be helpful to create a new or slightly different version of an existing content item. Content items where it is best practice to clone to create are news, alerts, and announcements.
Cloning is used when the Format if your of your content needs to look the same way, but the Content itself is different.
You should not clone existing basic pages or landing pages because it will disrupt the navigation and organization of the site.
- Log in to the site you’re trying to edit. To log in, go to the homepage URL and type “/user” at the end of the URL (do not include the quotation marks), then hit Return to navigate to that page. You will be asked to authenticate, which will log you into the site and return you to the homepage.
- Look for the editor ribbon on the page and select Edit. This ribbon is toward the top of the page underneath the main navigation menu. It will only appear if you are logged into the site. Once you click Edit, you will be taken to a backend editor’s view of the page.
- At the top of the backend view of the page, you will see a navigation bar with a horizontal list of actions. Click Clone.
You will be prompted to confirm you’d like to clone this page. Click Clone.
Once you click this, your content item will have been cloned. It will have the same name as the item it was cloned from with the word Cloned at the end. Otherwise, they will be identical.
- After you clone your item, it will take you to new cloned content item on the site. The word Cloned will be in the title. It will look the same as when you save an update on the site, with the green ribbon above the navigation bar.
If the content item you cloned had been PUBLISHED its clone will be published as well!
- Click Edit on the cloned item at the top navigation bar. Go into the back end of the page and edit the content item with your new content. Update the Title, Date, and Summary of the cloned item.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save, which will immediately record your changes and return you to the normal user’s view of the webpage, reflecting your new updates to the page. The unique URL will be updated when you click Save
- After you select Save, you will be brought back to the user view of the page you edited. There will be a green bar near the top navigation to alert you the page has been updated. Your new changes will appear immediately on the page.
While editing a page, if you accidentally delete the wrong content and need to start over, simply click the back arrow in the top left of your browser or close out of the browser tab or window completely.
As long as you do not save any mistakes you will not publish any mistakes.
If you need assistance creating, editing, removing, or recovering an accordion on your website, please contact the Finance Web Team at [email protected] with a summary of your needs.