Copy a TYPO3 campaign page with all its subpages from chat

A campaign comes back every season, and so does the work of rebuilding its pages. With TYPO3 MCP your AI assistant can copy a TYPO3 page with all its subpages, translations and content in one call, hidden until you are ready. We ran it on our demo install: the Spring Sale with its Deals and Terms pages became a hidden copy, renamed to Summer Sale. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, lets an assistant such as Claude work inside TYPO3 through tools that AI Foundation provides for free. Two things the copy does not finish for you: the URLs and an undo by batch ID.

On our demo the Spring Sale campaign of the Mustermann Outdoor site has two subpages, Deals and Terms, each in English and German. One request was enough: Copy our Spring Sale campaign page with its Deals and Terms pages, so we can prepare the Summer Sale. Put the copy right after the Spring Sale and keep it hidden.

The assistant called pages_copy with the option to include subpages. The copy brought along:

• 3 pages, placed directly after the Spring Sale in the page tree.
• 3 German translations, one per page.
• 6 content elements, one per page and language.
• A hidden top page. TYPO3 hides a copied page by default, so visitors do not see a second campaign. The subpages stay visible, but nobody reaches them while their parent is hidden.

A copy is only a start. The second request renamed it: Rename the copy to Summer Sale, in English and German, with headlines to match. Dry run first. Behind the answer sit these steps:

1. Copy. pages_copy with subpages, as above. It answers with the uid of the new page.
2. Dry run. records_apply, AI Foundation's tool for writing many records in one all-or-nothing call, first ran with dryRun. The server reports what it would change and rolls it back.
3. Rename. The same call without the dry run changed two page titles, Summer Sale and Sommer-Sale, and four headlines in one batch.
4. Check. Show me the copy as it is now: titles, URLs, SEO fields, visibility. The assistant read the pages again and reported each value.

Keep the batch ID of the rename. It is the way back for that step.

The check is where the copy shows its gaps. On our demo:

• The URL of the copy is /spring-sale-1, not /summer-sale.
• The subpage URLs keep the old parent path: /spring-sale/deals-1 and /spring-sale/terms-1, although the pages now sit below the copy.
• The SEO title and description still say Spring Sale.
• The text still says until 30 April.

We asked the assistant to set the new URLs as well. That call was refused, and nothing was written: URL changes over MCP still fail in the current AI Foundation release. Set the URL segments in the backend instead. Open the page properties of the copy and of each subpage, then recalculate the URL from the new title. Then ask the assistant for the SEO fields and the dates, with a dry run first.

Put it back

We took everything back on our demo, in two steps:

• The rename went back with records_undo and its batch ID, after a dry run of the undo.
• The copy has no batch ID: pages_copy is a single call outside the batch tools, so records_undo cannot take it back. We removed it with a delete in records_apply, again after a dry run. TYPO3 marks deleted pages as deleted, so they stay in the Recycler, and the delete has its own batch ID.

Afterwards we cleared the page caches and checked the website: the Spring Sale answered as before, and the copy's URL answered 404. AI Foundation can also hold changes in a TYPO3 draft workspace for review.

What the assistant cannot do for you

• It cannot set the URLs. Slug changes over MCP fail; use the page properties.
• It cannot undo the copy by batch ID. Remove an unwanted copy with a delete, which can be undone.
• It does not know what has changed since spring. Dates, prices and terms are your call.
• It writes only what your backend user may write. A page you may not copy is refused.

The video for this episode asks for the copy and the rename in Claude on our demo install, then shows the new pages in the TYPO3 page tree and their URLs in the page properties. Shown in Claude; other MCP assistants work too.

This job uses AI Foundation's core tools, which are free and open source, no licence key, no registration. AI Assistant, AI Accessibility, AI Chatbot and AI Search add their own MCP tools for writing, translation, alt text, chatbots and search. Each needs its own licence. Together with AI Foundation they bring 100+ MCP tools.

What your assistant reads, it sends to its vendor, as with any chat. Keep that in mind before you let it read pages that are not public yet.

The other post of this episode puts fileadmin in order from chat: which files are in use, clear names, a review folder and an import from a URL. Episode 7 sets pages to go live and expire on a date, a good fit for the Summer Sale. It also follows an editor through a working day with MCP. Episode 5 covered your first prompts and draft workspaces; episode 3 brought everyday edits from chat. If you are new to the series, start with TYPO3 MCP use cases: what you can hand to an AI assistant, on one map.

The series comes from T3Planet by NITSAN Technologies, a TYPO3 Association Gold Member with more than 15 years of TYPO3 work. Its episodes are written by Jürgen, our AI Consultant for TYPO3. Every episode runs its job on our demo install before it is published.

All episodes of MCP in Practice for TYPO3