Description

Simple History shows recent changes made within WordPress, directly on your dashboard or on a separate page.
The plugin works as a log/history/audit log/version history of the most important events that occur in WordPress.
Out of the box Simple History has support for:

  • Posts and pages
    see who added, updated or deleted a post or page
  • Attachments
    see who added, updated or deleted an attachment
  • Taxonomies (Custom taxonomies, categories, tags)
    see who added, updated or deleted an taxonomy
  • Comments
    see who edited, approved or removed a comment
  • Widgets
    get info when someone adds, updates or removes a widget in a sidebar
  • Plugins
    activation and deactivation
  • User profiles
    info about added, updated or removed users
  • User logins
    see when a user login & logout. Also see when a user fails to login (good way to catch brute-force login attempts).
  • Failed user logins
    see when someone has tried to log in, but failed. The log will then include ip address of the possible hacker.
  • Menu edits
  • Option screens
    view details about changes made in the differnt settings sections of WordPress. Things like changes to the site title and the permalink structure will be logged.
  • Privacy page
    when a privacy page is created or set to a new page.
  • Data Export
    see when a privacy data export request is added and when this request is approved by the user, downloaded by an admin, or emailed to the user.
  • User Data Erasure Requests
    see when a user privacy data export request is added and when this request is approved by the user and when the user data is removed.

Support for third party plugins

By default Simple History comes with built in support for the following plugins:
Jetpack
The Jetpack plugin is a plugin from Automattic (the company behind the WordPress.com service) that lets you supercharge your website by adding a lot of extra functions.
In Simple History you will see what Jetpack modules that are activated and deactivated.
(The creator of Simple History recommends this plugin and its brute force attack protection functions btw. It’s a really good way to block unwanted login attempts from malicious botnets and distributed attacks.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
ACF adds fields to your posts and pages.
Simple History will log changes made to the field groups and the fields inside field groups. Your will see when both field groups and fields are created and modified.
User Switching
The User Switching plugin allows you to quickly swap between user accounts in WordPress at the click of a button.
Simple History will log each user switch being made.
WP Crontrol
The WP Crontrol plugin enables you to view and control what’s happening in the WP-Cron system.
Simple History will log when cron events are added, edited, deleted, and manually ran, and when cron schedules are added and deleted.
Enable Media Replace
The Enable Media Replace plugin allows you to replace a file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place.
Simple history will log details about the file being replaced and details about the new file.
Limit Login Attempts
The plugin Limit Login Attempts is old
and has not been updated for 4 years. However it still has +1 million installs, so many users will benefit from
Simple History logging login attempts, lockouts, and configuration changes made in the plugin Limit Login Attempts.
Redirection
The redirection plugin manages url redirections, using a nice GUI.
Simple History will log redirects and groups that are created, changed, enabled or disabled and also when the global plugin settings have been modified.
Duplicate Post
The plugin Duplicate Post allows users to
clone posts of any type.
Simple History will log when a clone of a post or page is done.
Beaver Builder
The plugin Beaver Build is a page builder for WordPress that adds a flexible drag and drop page builder to the front end of your WordPress website.
Simple History will log when a Beaver Builder layout or template is saved or when the settings for the plugins are saved.

RSS feed with changes

There is also a RSS feed of changes available, so you can keep track of the changes made via your favorite RSS reader on your phone, on your iPad, or on your computer.
It’s a plugin that is good to have on websites where several people are
involved in editing the content.
The plugin works fine on multisite installations of WordPress too.

Example scenarios

Keep track of what other people are doing:
“Has someone done anything today? Ah, Sarah uploaded
the new press release and created an article for it. Great! Now I don’t have to do that.”
Or for debug purposes:
“The site feels slow since yesterday. Has anyone done anything special? … Ah, Steven activated ‘naughy-plugin-x’,
that must be it.”

API so you can add your own events to the audit log

If you are a theme or plugin developer and would like to add your own things/events to Simple History you can do that by using the function SimpleLogger() like this:

<?php

if ( function_exists("SimpleLogger") ) {

        // Most basic example: just add some information to the log
        SimpleLogger()->info("This is a message sent to the log");

        // A bit more advanced: log events with different severities
        SimpleLogger()->info("User admin edited page 'About our company'");
        SimpleLogger()->warning("User 'Jessie' deleted user 'Kim'");
        SimpleLogger()->debug("Ok, cron job is running!");

}
?>

Check out the examples-folder for more examples.

Translations/Languages

So far Simple History is translated to:

  • Swedish
  • German
  • Polish
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Russian

I’m looking for translations of Simple History in more languages! If you want to translate Simple History
to your language then read about how this is done over at the Polyglots handbook.

Contribute at GitHub

Development of this plugin takes place at GitHub. Please join in with feature requests, bug reports, or even pull requests!