Simple History

A lightweight activity feed plugin for WordPress

Simple History is a WordPress audit log plugin that logs various things that occur in WordPress and then presents those events in a very nice GUI. It's great way to view user activity and keep an eye on what the admin users of a website are doing.

Download from WordPress.org:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-history/

Screenshots

Viewing history events

This screenshot show the user activity feed:

• It has an active filter/search in use:
  • only show changes performed by a specific user
  • it only shows event that are of type post and pages and media (i.e. images & other uploads)
• A thumbnail is shown for the image that is uploaded

Events with different severity

Simple History uses the log levels specified in the PHP PSR-3 standard.

Quick diff lets you see what's changed

Events have context with extra details

Each logged event can include useful rich formatted extra information. For example: a plugin install can contain author info and a the url to the plugin, and an uploaded image can contain a thumbnail of the image.

Plugin API

Developers can easily log their own things using a simple API:

<?php

// This is the easiest and safest way to add messages to the log
// If the plugin is disabled this way will not generate in any error
apply_filters("simple_history_log", "This is a logged message");

// Or with some context and with log level debug:
apply_filters(
	'simple_history_log',
	'My message about something',
	[
		'debugThing' => $myThingThatIWantIncludedInTheLoggedEvent,
		'anotherThing' => $anotherThing
	],
	'debug'
);

// Or just debug a message quickly
apply_filters('simple_history_log_debug', 'My debug message');

// You can also use functions/methods to add events to the log
SimpleLogger()->info("This is a message sent to the log");

// Add events of different severity
SimpleLogger()->info("User admin edited page 'About our company'");
SimpleLogger()->warning("User 'Jessie' deleted user 'Kim'");
SimpleLogger()->debug("Ok, cron job is running!");

You will find more examples in the examples.php file.

Running tests

Run $ npm run test to run the tests.

The tests are located in the tests-folder and Docker is used to create a WordPress environment to run the tests. The Dockerfile used is based on PHPUnit WordPress Plugin.

Currently the tests are run on:

• WordPress 5.6.2 with PHP 7.2
• WordPress 5.6.2 with PHP 7.4.15
• WordPress 5.2 with PHP 5.6