Many WordPress designers and developers take advantage of the ‘Starter Site Method’ to get new projects off the ground quickly.

If you aren’t familiar with a starter site, here’s a great video from Dave Foy explaining how it works.

Essentially, you create a WordPress website that has all your plugins and settings pre-loaded and when it’s time to start a new project, instead of starting from scratch with a fresh WordPress install you clone your Starter Site and get a head start.

If you have adopted Docket WP into your workflow, you might consider adding the plugin to your starter site— but before you do, you need to understand the effects of cloning a site with Docket WP installed.

The Project ID

Before we jump into how the Starter Site Method affects Docket WP (DWP), you first need to understand how our Project ID’s work.

Any time you install DWP on a new website, DWP generates a unique Project ID for that website. It’s because of this unique Project ID that your separate websites do not share the same lists— which is by design. Each website has its own “mini-account” within your account where it creates, stores, and archives your lists independently of any other website.

Cloning a Starter Site with Docket WP Installed

When you clone a website (a starter site in this case) you also clone the DWP Project ID and both the “old” and “new” copies of your cloned site will share the same ID.

Any websites with the same Project ID will share all of their lists in real time. Meaning if you add, complete, or trash a list or task to one site, any other site with the same Project ID will also have those tasks added, completed, or removed in real time.

This is not ideally how you want your Starter Site system to behave. Typically, you’ll want your new website to have its own unique Project ID— and we’ve made that simple.

How to Regenerate a Project ID

If you have cloned your starter site and want to give the new copy its own unique Project ID, the solution is simple and already built into the Docket WP plugin settings.

From the WordPress dashboard of your cloned website, hover over ‘Settings’, then click ‘Docket WP’.

Docket WP WordPress Settings
Docket WP WordPress Settings

From the settings panel, click the ‘Regenerate Project ID’ button.

WARNING: THIS ACTION CANNOT BE UNDONE AND WILL ERASE ANY ACTIVE, ARCHIVED, OR TRASHED LISTS ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Regenerate Project ID
Regenerate Project ID

Your browser will prompt you to make sure that you want to take this action. If you want to move forward with regenerating your Project ID, press ‘OK’ to continue.

Your website will be assigned a new, unique, and completely clean Project ID that does not match any of your other projects.

An Alternative to Regenerating a Project ID

Alternatively, if you do not want to Regenerate your Project ID each time you clone your starter site, you can choose to not install Docket WP on your starter site, which will prevent the issue of two websites sharing the same Project ID from ever happening.