This is a quick and super easy way to mimic the functionality of a content type in your Drupal install. On the site I'm working on we wanted to replicate functionality for two content types. Now the Drupal way would say to use the same content type and filter them with taxonomy or even a CCK field. In this instance the two content types currently offer the same functionality but there is reason to believe that in the future one will get a lot of changes or even a completely different layout then the other so it was decided to keep them separate.

Either way you decide to go this isn't about workflow. This is about how you can mimic the look of a content type without duplicating the code. To start we did duplicate the content type so all the CCK fields were implemented in content type #2. Once that was done we simply need to add a quick one line function to point the template for content type #2 back to #1.

In template.php add...

function theme_preprocess_node(&$vars) {
if ($vars[type]=='ctype2') {
  $vars['template_files'][] = 'node-ctype1';
}

That's it. Simple and easy.