The Torque News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news.

In this week’s episode we talk about further delays to WordCamp Asia 2021 and YOAST’s acquisition of the Duplicate Post plugin.

Love WordPress News but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is the Torque News Drop.

Let’s start off with some bummer news… WordCamp Asia has been postponed again. The first ever WordCamp Asia was originally scheduled in February of this year, but then the pandemic hit and it became the first of many WordPress meetups to get cancelled. The team had been stating they were still planning on doing their inaugural event in Bangkok in early 2020, but a recent announcement on their blog indicates that is no longer the plan.

“According to our local team in Bangkok, domestic lockdown is starting to be eased in the wake of a drop in COVID-19 cases. On the other hand, the state of emergency is still in force and most incoming international flights are banned.

There is a discussion about travel bubbles through bilateral agreements – but with just Japan and China at the moment. There hasn’t been any announcement for a roadmap to open the borders completely.

Considering the situation, the organizing team came to the conclusion to cancel the plan to hold the first WordCamp Asia in January 2021.

We will be picking the new dates when we have a better idea of the international travel situation. We’ll make sure to announce it at least 6 months prior to the event.”

Our thoughts go out to the WordCamp Asia team, who have been working so hard to make this event happen in a difficult time. There’s no telling if the team will end up switching to a fully virtual model like WordCamp Europe did, or if they’ll wait until they can have a physical meetup, but I’m sure it will be awesome whenever and wherever they finally have it.

Have you ever found yourself looking for an easy way to duplicate a post on your site? Let’s say for instance that you do a weekly video series on a popular WordPress news site and you’d like to just take last week’s post and share it again with updated links and a new title? That’s exactly what the Duplicate Posts plugin offers. We’ve been a huge fan this plugin for many years and were excited to find out that YOAST SEO has acquired this popular plugin and will be adding it’s creator, Enrico Battocchi, as a senior developer to their team. According to Enrico, the plugin will always retain it’s current features and remain a totally free plugin in the WordPress repository, but there isn’t much more known about what, if any, new features we may expect to see added or how YOAST might integrate the Duplicate Post into their SEO plugin. I wonder if they’ll change the name to YOAST Duplicator? Get it?

We were talking about this about on our weekly livestream show, The Torque Social Hour, and I was speculating that one of the reasons an SEO company might be interested in a Duplicate Post plugin was to help increase the time of getting all your SEO settings right. Back to that example from earlier, if I’m starting with a post with all the categories and tags set up, along with a featured image or whatever things I might need, all I have to do is duplicate that post and I’ll have all that information ready to go. Of course I’ll still need to update parts of it, but it sure does save some time.

Congrats to Enrico and the YOAST team on their new venture. We are looking forward to see what y’all create together.

That’s it for this week’s news drop, stay tuned next week for more WordPress news!