Can Sitecore Clones Become More Automatic

Question

I have read what I can on cloning and it seems like a partial solution for our client. I read http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/Getting-to-Know-Sitecore/Posts/2010/10/Cloning-What-Ifs.aspx but the commenters didn't finish out the answer.

Sitecore clones give notification on changes which is nice and supports the idea of workflow for all items, but the clone parent does not give information on what is cloned from it. So when a change is made on our (mainly) master site, finding each cloned item in the 5 sister sites is going to become much too tedious too fast.

I believe that proxy items would have once been the true solution, but considering that they are deprecated, I don't think it's a solution we are looking to implement.

Besides modifying our workflow and messing around with the clones, is there a built-in or easier way to maintain clones?

Desired Behavior:
When parent of clones becomes approved into a final workflow state => Accept the changes on the clones as well.
Or
Less Desired:
Give a list of all child clones of an item in the Content Editor with links to edit.

Answer 1

For your desired behavior: you'd have to implement either an event handler or pipeline processor that when an item is approved, you use the Links Database to find all clones of it and programmatically approve those. I believe this is certainly do-able from a code perspective.

For your less desired behavior: you can use the Navigate tab > Links drop-down to find clones. Just look at the Referrers that have the _source field displayed, meaning they refer to that item via the "_source" field which means they're a clone of it.

UPDATE

To modify the workflow of an item via C#, refer to Changing the Workflow State on an Item.