Copying vs. Mirroring (Cloning) Page Parts

Copy Vs. Mirror Page Parts

You may have seen this option pop up when you're installing a new page part on a page, or the need to duplicate a page part may have come up recently. You might have asked yourself, what's the difference between Copying and Mirroring a page part, and which is right for me?

Not every page part installation will offer you the option to copy or Mirror, but when it does here are what these options mean:

• New = building the content from the ground up. The page part structure is available for you to add in your content.
• Mirror = When mirroring an existing page part, you are duplicating content that exists elsewhere on the site. The original AND the duplicate are controlled in the same place. If you want to edit the text that appears on the mirrored page part, you have to edit the original page part where the clone is originating from, and this edit will push to both the original and the duplicated page part. 
• Copy = When copying an existing page part, you are essentially importing the content from an existing page part over to your new page part. All of the content copies over from the original page part, but you are safely able to edit or delete this content on your new page part without affecting the original page part where you copied the content from.

When's it appropriate to mirror versus copy?

Let's say your organization is a University. You have a blog installed on your New Students page with numerous blog entries about Student Housing, How to Sign up for Classes, etc. 

Your Residence Life staff wants a blog with its own content on their own page. There are some blog entries on the New Students blog that the Residence Life staff thinks would be helpful for their new blog. Instead of having to manually copy and paste all of the existing entries, the Residence Life staff could install a blog on their page and use the Copy function to copy over that New Students blog. Then they can delete out the irrelevant entries.

Now let's say your Recruiting department thinks the content on the New Students page is stellar, and they want to use it to get interested students to commit to the University. In this case, the Recruiting department may use the Mirror function. They would mirror the content from the New Students page onto their Interested Students page. That way, when the New Students blog is updated, the new blog entry and/or edited blog post appears on the Interested Students page as well. The blog is only updated on the New Students page, but it pushes the changes to both the New Students and the Interested Students pages.