Simple History 5.4 released: Admin Quick View, Enhanced WP-CLI Support, and More

We’re excited to announce Simple History 5.4, bringing significant improvements to enhance your WordPress activity monitoring experience.

Let’s dive into the key features and improvements in this release.

🔍 Admin Bar Quick View Now Available for Everyone

The Admin Bar Quick View feature, which was introduced as an experimental feature in version 5.1.0, is now enabled by default for all users. Based on user feedback, we’ve made several improvements to enhance the user experience, including moving the reload button to the top for easier access.

This feature has proven particularly valuable for users managing client websites. When working across multiple posts and switching between frontend and backend, Quick View provides instant access to your recent activities, saving precious time in your workflow.

⚡ New Event Actions Toolbar

Building on the event actions menu introduced in Simple History 5, we’re now expanding its capabilities with actions that can be applied to all events matching your current search filters. The new toolbar, accessible via the familiar three-dot menu (similar to popular platforms like BlueSky and Instagram), makes it easy to perform actions on your filtered event set.

This enhancement was part of our vision for the version 5 React rewrite, and we’re thrilled to announce that add-ons can now integrate their own actions into this menu.

The first implementation of this feature comes with our new Premium add-on, which adds an “Export events” action supporting CSV, JSON, and HTML formats.

🛠️ Five new WP-CLI Commands

For developers and power users, we’ve added five new WP-CLI commands to enhance command-line interaction with Simple History. These commands are particularly valuable for developers and security personnel managing multiple WordPress sites, as they enable efficient automation and integration with existing tooling and monitoring systems.

By supporting command-line access to the event log, you can easily incorporate Simple History data into bash scripts, monitoring tools, or automated security audits.

wp simple-history event list   # List events
wp simple-history event get    # Get details about a single event
wp simple-history event search # Search events
wp simple-history db stats     # Get database stats
wp simple-history db clear     # Clear the events database

These commands make it straightforward to, for example, create a daily summary of important events across multiple sites, automate security audits, or integrate Simple History data into your existing DevOps workflows.

🐛 Improvements and Bug Fixes

This release also contains some bug fixes and usability enhancements:

• Log when a post or page is moved to trash using the Gutenberg editor. #491
• Change copy when creating user and sending password with email #493
• Add HTML to list of available export formats. Exporting to HTML will give you an unstyled HTML file that you can open in a web browser and view the contents.
• Show an error message when the log could not be loaded on the server. Any error message from server will be displayed. This hopefully makes it easier to understand why the log is not loading and can assist in troubleshooting.
• Add loading skeleton for events log.
• Show a nicer message when no results found.
• Fix php notice when logging found plugin updates if another plugin used an invalid plugin slug (e.g., “myplugin” instead of “myplugin/myplugin.php”) #497
• Fix for error message widget_setting_too_many_options when saving a widget in a classic theme with Classic Widgets plugin installed. #498

📥 Update Now

Simple History 5.4.0 is available now from the WordPress plugin repository. You can update through WordPress’s regular plugin update functionality in your admin panel.

💚 Support Simple History

If you find Simple History useful in your work, consider checking out our Premium add-on for additional features, or sponsor the project to support ongoing development.