The diary duplicator allows you to copy your events from the current year into the next and thus easily set up the next years calendar of events and competitions etc.

The tool is found by clicking on the 'diary' menu entry as an administrator (may be called 'events' or something similar on certain websites). It will then be visible as one of the expanding panels on the side of the diary view.

A typical workflow for using the diary duplicator to set up a calendar for the next year will follow these steps (but read on for more options):

1. Choose how far forward you want to shift events from 52 weeks, 53 weeks or exactly 1 year. For more information read: Diary Duplication Methods
2. Select which calendar to duplicate from the dropdown next to "in calendar".
3. Click "duplicate events now"
4. You will now be taken to the Diary Bulk Editor view where you can review the events you have created. You can make any adjustments to their dates etc here before activating them.
5. Once you are satisfied with the duplicated events you can scroll to the bottom of the bulk editor and click 'Select all', choose 'Make Active' from the list of actions and then click "Apply actions to the selected events" to bring the events online.

If you have made a mistake in duplicating the events then you can clear the events by going through the same steps as in stage 5 above but instead choose "delete" from the list of actions.

When events are first duplicated they are set up with a special "duplicated" status that won't appear as online until explicitly set. By filtering on this status and selecting the appropriate date range you are able to return to the diary bulk editor at any time and finish this task if you decide you are not ready to make your events active just yet.

N.b. the diary duplicator won't allow you to do another duplication until you have deleted or activated any other 'duplicated' events within that time period.

Further diary duplication options

When performing the duplication there are a couple of further options that you can check to customise the behaviour of the duplicator.

Reset start & end times of duplicated events - By default the duplicator will copy all the start and end times to the new event. Checking this option will leave them out so all the duplicated events will have no start or end times to begin with.

Also duplicate any inactive/offline events - By default the duplicator will not include inactive or offline events. Checking this option will include these events (they will be made active when you activate the duplicated events).

Choosing custom date to duplicate

By changing the dates in the field under "Choose existing events to duplicate" you can change the range of dates to duplicate from. 

Click inside one of the date fields to bring up a calendar date selector.

In the image above we have selected the first of January to the 30th of June, so when we hit 'Duplicate Events Now' only the first half of the year will be copied over.

The dates to duplicate will default to the whole of the current year.

The duplicator will always copy the range selected into the next year (even if the range selected contains more than one year for some reason - so events in 2016 will be added to 2017 and events in 2017 will be added to 2018 etc).

Date duplication method

The diary duplicator can use 52 week, 53 week or year based duplication. More details can be found in the article: Diary Duplication Methods