CoreActivity is a new plugin in the ‘Core’ line of plugins for WordPress, and it is available for free. The plugin can be downloaded from Dev4Press and GitHub for now, and soon it will be available on WordPress.org.
Due to the huge backlog of plugins to be reviewed on WordPress.org, it is currently unknown when CoreActivity will be reviewed and available on WordPress.org. Until that happens, CoreActivity will remain in the Beta stage and be available for download from the Dev4Press website. Based on the current estimates from WordPress.org, CoreActivity might wait until August. Because of that, I decided to release the plugin early, without waiting for WordPress.org to finish the review process.
This plugin aims to log various events and activities on WordPress-powered websites and provide an easy way to review, filter and analyze logs. Activity is logged in the database tables. You have control over which events are active, with additional filters to control further what is logged and what should be skipped. The plugin logs various information about each request: URL, IP, method, protocol, and context (AJAX, REST, CRON, CLI), with an optional user agent and referer. And many types of events include the source of the event (file, line, plugin, theme, and more).
CoreActivity has three categories of logging components: WordPress, Internal, and Plugins. The first category includes components dealing with core-based events, Internal deals with events inside the CoreActivity plugin, and the Plugins category includes components handling events from third-party plugins. Several popular third-party plugins are currently supported, with more coming. The plugin allows other plugins to add their components for logging, and various Dev4Press plugins will take advantage of that in the future.
Plugin currently includes support for 22 components and over 100 events. Some components depend on specific conditions or third-party plugins, so not every component will be active upon installation. More details will be provided on the CoreActivity dashboard and via the Events panel, where all registered components and events will be shown.
The log panel can search and filter lists by logged date, component, event, user, object, and more. For each log entry, you can see additional metadata. The log panel has a live update feature, which can get new events matching filters while the page is loaded. Plugin has options to control the logging process (including exceptions for some components and events), data display in the log, and more. An auto-maintenance process can clean up old log entries, and a Tool allows you to remove log entries selectively.
Finally, the plugin has full support for Multisite. It will be activated network-wide, with each blog in the network able to see log relevant to that blog, and the Network admin will show all the data for all the blogs and all the logs from the network level (and the plugin has logging components that are network level only).
The current Beta release is missing a few features that should be ready soon and will be added in one of the upcoming (weekly) Beta releases. The plugin will get an email notifications system with instant (or time-limited instant notifications, sent once every 5 minutes at the most) and daily and weekly digests. You can configure the email content for these notifications too. I am sure some bugs are still present, and some things might not work (bulk delete from the Logs screen), but with more testing and development time, that will be improved for the Stable release.
More about CoreActivity
To learn more about the plugin, check out the official home page and the list of all components and events included with the latest version available. The download page is here. More information about the plugin will be added soon.
Why only the free version? I believe every website needs to have a plugin like this one, and the best way to wide adoption is to have the plugin free, base future development on community requests, and have it open on GitHub for community-driven development, too. Many activity log plugins are available, but many have Pro upsells, and many lack features that I found useful and wanted to include. Not to mention that all the activity logging plugins I tested in the past years have various downsides, and I would not use any of them myself.
Also, some of the Dev4Press plugins so far have used their logging systems. With the release of CoreActivity, future updates for Dev4Press plugins can rely on a centralized solution for activity logging. And, CoreActivity logs can be customized for use in other plugins so that plugins can only show their log entries or customize what columns are displayed and more.
So, feel free to test the plugin and let me know if you find any issues, and if you want to see more components and events added to the plugin.
To see the list of all the changes in this version, please check out the changelog. If you find any issues with the new version, please, report them in the support forums.
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