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The Assistant

Overview

A copy is rarely meant to stay identical to its original. A landing page for another city needs the other city’s name; a copy for another site needs its links moved; a product variant needs a new name and price. The Assistant does this for you: it is a list of steps that runs on every copy made with a profile.

Open RB Plugins → Duplicate Post → Copy profiles, pick a profile and open the Assistant tab. Tick Run these steps on every copy of this profile to switch it on.

The Assistant is set up in four parts.

1. What are the copies for?

Start from a template. It fills in the questions and steps for a common job, and you adjust them:

• A landing page for another city — asks for the new city and puts it everywhere the old one was: title, text, excerpt.
• A copy for another site or domain — rewrites links and mentions of the old domain.
• A product variant — a new name in the text, a new price and a tag (custom field and term steps: PRO).
• A unique text with AI — AI rewrites the title and text in other words and writes a fresh SEO description (PRO, see AI).
• A translation draft with AI — asks for the language and translates the copy (PRO).
• A clean draft to rework — every copy is a draft, and the SEO keyphrase and canonical address of the original are not taken over.

Choosing a template replaces the questions and steps of the profile (you are asked first).

2. Questions when you copy

A question is asked in the copy dialog every time the profile is used — for example “New city?”. The answer is used in the steps as {name}: a question named to is written {to}.

Always available, without a question:

• {title} — the title of the original
• {date} — today’s date, in the site’s date format
• {site} — the site name

3. Steps, in this order

Steps run one after another; a later step sees what earlier steps changed. Each step can be switched off without deleting it, moved up or down, or removed. A profile has up to 30 steps.

Replace a text

Finds a text in the title, content and/or excerpt and replaces it.

• Exactly as written — letter case matters.
• Any letter case — berlin, Berlin and BERLIN are all found.
• Whole words, any case — Berlin is replaced, Berliner is not.
• Pattern (regular expression) (PRO) — e.g. find (\d+) GB, replace with $1 TB.

In the content only what people read is changed: the text, and the alt, title and label texts of elements and blocks. Class names, IDs, styles and link addresses stay as they are, so the layout never breaks. To change addresses, use the next step.

Change link addresses

Every link and image address (href, src, and the URLs inside blocks) that starts with a text gets a new start: https://old.example.com → https://new.example.com, or /old-section/ → /new-section/.

Set the status of the copy

Draft, pending review, private or published — regardless of the profile’s Status element.

Change a custom field (PRO)

• Set to a value — e.g. _regular_price = {price}
• Replace a text in it
• Remove from the copy — e.g. an SEO canonical address that must not point to the original

Change categories, tags or terms (PRO)

Add, remove or set exactly terms of any taxonomy, comma-separated. Names that do not exist yet are created.

AI steps (PRO)

Rewrite with AI, Translate with AI and Write with AI (excerpt, SEO title, SEO description) — see AI.

4. Try it on a post

Find a post, answer the questions and click Show what changes. You see the title, excerpt, status and content as they are and as a copy would have them, plus what the custom field and term steps would do. Nothing is copied or saved.

Click Save profile when the steps are right.

Good to know

• The Assistant runs for copies made from the list, the editor, the bulk action, the “+ New” menu, Auto copy and WP-CLI (answers with --answer=name=value).
• It never runs for Rewrite & Republish: a rewrite must stay the same text until you change it.
• The original post is never changed.

Next steps

• Profiles and the copy dialog
• AI with your own key (PRO)