I am looking for the best way to make a complete clone of a salesforce instance including all fields, objects, scripts, formulae and layouts but MINUS any data or user accounts. The NEW instance would need to be totally separate from the original and needs to retain the ability to still be further customized if necessary. I have already found some clues by reading material at the following links:

https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000hPT7AAM

http://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/47/copying-metadata-and-code-from-one-production-org-to-another

http://blog.jeffdouglas.com/2008/07/15/migrating-salesforcecom-configurations-with-the-metadata-api-forcecom-migration-tool/

But I still need more details.  Is a specific minimum edition of salesforce required? Is there a way to also retain all the plugins that were in the original so that they are also in the new instance?

The use case here is the following: We have spent an enormous amount of time extensively customizing salesforce to get it to record and do exactly what we want for our specific business. Now we need to deploy salesforce to a totally new business so that the second salesforce instance does exactly the same thing as the first, but the new business cannot be allowed to see any of the customer data in the original salesforce instance (or vice versa).  Any ideas?

Hi! For customer support handling, I have created a visualforce page with an iframe that loads our external help site. This way I am able to navigate our help articles without leaving salesforce.

However, when I find an applicable solution, I would like to copy that URL to paste in an email to the customer.

I tried putting {!$CurrentPage.URL} above my iframe but that just displays the URL to my Visualforce tab.

How do I display my iFrame url? Note that this URL will need to dynamically update as I navigate to different help articles.

Thanks!

Hi! For customer support handling, I have created a visualforce page with an iframe that loads our external help site. This way I am able to navigate our help articles without leaving salesforce.

However, when I find an applicable solution, I would like to copy that URL to paste in an email to the customer.

I tried putting {!$CurrentPage.URL} above my iframe but that just displays the URL to my Visualforce tab.

How do I display my iFrame url? Note that this URL will need to dynamically update as I navigate to different help articles.

Thanks!