Hi @kenny1234,
Thanks for the detailed write-up. Just so we’re on the same page, I want to clarify how Rewrite & Republish is designed to work, because the behavior you describe doesn’t quite match the feature.
Rewrite & Republish does not publish the rewrite at a new URL with a redirect from the old one. By design, it merges the rewritten draft back into the original post, keeping the same URL (and same post ID, comments, etc.), then deletes the temporary copy. So there should only ever be one published URL: the original.
If you were previously seeing old-to-new URL redirects, that was almost certainly being handled outside of Duplicate Post. Two likely candidates:
- A separate plugin (Redirection, etc.) creating the redirects automatically.
- Custom code or a snippet on your site (in functions.php, a mu-plugin, or a code-snippets plugin) hooking into the republish flow to set up new slugs and redirects. If a developer set this up at some point, it may have stopped working after a plugin or WordPress update.
It would be worth checking with anyone who has worked on the site, or grepping your theme and mu-plugins for hooks like duplicate_post_after_rewriting or new_to_publish, to see if something custom used to handle this.
That said, the “new URL 404” symptom you’re seeing also fits a known failure mode where the republish/merge step itself fails, leaving an orphaned copy with the dp-rewrite-republish status (which isn’t publicly accessible, hence the 404). This usually comes from a conflict with a page builder or another plugin interrupting the flow.
A few things that would help diagnose:
- WordPress and Yoast Duplicate Post versions?
- Any page builder (Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, etc.)?
- Other active SEO/redirect plugins?
- Any custom snippets or mu-plugins touching post duplication or redirects?
- Can you reproduce the issue with other plugins temporarily deactivated and a default theme like Twenty Twenty-Four?
Thanks!
