Simple History 5.24.0 released — user cards, dashboard widget redesign, detailed menu logging, and more

Simple History 5.24.0 brings user card popovers, a redesigned dashboard widget, detailed menu change logging, copy-as-image sharing, and a new Site Health Logger.

This is one of the bigger releases in a while — focused on making the activity log faster to scan and faster to load, and more detailed where it matters.

Click any avatar or user name in your activity log and you’ll get a popover card showing the user’s display name, role, email, and a link to their profile. It’s a small thing, but it saves a lot of trips to the Users page when you’re reviewing who did what.

If you have Simple History Premium, the card also shows login history and recent activity for that user.

Screenshot: User card popover showing display name, role, email, and profile link

Dashboard widget redesign

The dashboard widget got a complete makeover. It now shows an activity stats summary with event counts for today and the last 7 days, along with a cleaner, more compact event list. It fits much better with all other widgets on the dashboard. Before this change the widget was way too large and duplicated pretty much all functionality from the dedicated events page.

The redesigned dashboard widget with activity stats and compact event list

It also loads significantly faster. The widget now limits queries to the last 7 days and skips the total count query, which makes a real difference on sites with large activity logs.

Copy as image

There’s a new “Copy as image” action in the event menu. It captures an event as a branded PNG card and copies it to your clipboard, ready to paste into Slack, a bug report, social media, or wherever you need it.

Handy when you want to share what happened without sending someone a screenshot of your entire screen.

An event as it looks when downloaded as a PNG using the new “Copy as image” action.

Detailed menu change logging

Previously, menu changes were logged with just item counts — “3 items added, 2 items removed.” Now you get the full picture: item names, types, renames, moves between positions, order changes, and display location updates. Much more useful when you’re trying to figure out who moved what in your navigation.

Menu change event showing item names, renames, addition, removal, and position changes

Site Health Logger

Your activity log now tracks WordPress Site Health test results. When an issue is detected, resolved, or changes severity, it shows up alongside your other events. Particularly useful for catching problems early — if a Site Health check starts failing, you’ll see it next to whatever other changes happened around the same time.

Improved search

Two experimental search improvements are available if you enable experimental features in Simple History’s settings page:

Scoped search — Search now only scans the visible event message text by default, making results more relevant and dramatically faster on sites with large activity logs. Previously, search also scanned all hidden metadata, which was slow and returned unexpected matches.
Per-word matching — Multi-word search now matches each word independently across all searchable fields. For example, “api request 400” finds events where “api” and “request” appear in the message text and “400” appears in event metadata.

In addition to these experimental features there is also a new Event metadata search: A new search field in advanced filters for searching all event data including IP addresses, emails, and other metadata.

More UI and logging improvements

Image edits — Crop, rotate, flip, and scale operations are now logged in the media logger, including a thumbnail preview.

Action links on post events — Edit, View, Preview, and Revisions links now appear below post events. These new actions links will slowly be added to more event types.

Redesigned IP address popover — Prominent IP display with AS number links, map service links (Google Maps and OpenStreetMap), and subnet filtering.

Performance and technical changes

Admin bar JavaScript reduced by removing the wp-components dependency, saving ~919 KB on every page load.
Object caching added to stats queries, preventing duplicate database queries.
Failed login throttling (experimental) — logs the first 100 failed attempts, then skips the rest to protect the database from brute-force floods.

Heads up: WP-CLI argument rename

If you use WP-CLI to query Simple History, note that the --user argument has been renamed to --userid and --exclude_user to --exclude_userid. This avoids a conflict with WP-CLI’s own global --user argument, which was causing warnings on newer WP-CLI versions. If you have scripts using the old argument names, you’ll need to update them.

Get the update

Simple History 5.24.0 is available now. Update from your WordPress dashboard or download it from WordPress.org.

If you’re using Simple History Premium, update that too — the user card popover shows extra login history and recent activity for Premium users.

Found a bug or have feedback? Let us know on the support forum.

Full changelog

Added

User card on avatar and name click, showing name, role, and email with a link to the user profile. The Premium add-on extends the card with login history and recent activity.
“Copy as image” action in the event menu that captures an event as a shareable image, ready to paste into Slack, social media, or bug reports.
Site Health Logger that tracks WordPress Site Health test status changes, logging when issues are detected, resolved, or change severity.
Menu change logging now shows item names, types, renames, moves, order changes, and display location updates instead of just item counts.
Parent category changes and diff details (name, slug, description, parent) when viewing edited category and tag events.
Logging when a page is set as the homepage or posts page from the block editor, including the name of the previously assigned page.
Image edit logging (crop, rotate, flip, scale) in the media logger, including a thumbnail preview.
Command palette command to view event history for the current post or page.
“Event metadata” search field in the advanced filters for searching all event data including IP addresses and emails.
“Clear filters” button to reset all search filters to their default values.
Rotating tips in the sidebar to help users discover features like RSS feeds, WP-CLI, export, and sticky events.
User creation and profile update counts in the email digest report, displayed alongside login statistics in the Users section.
REST API skip_count_query parameter to skip the total count query when pagination info is not needed.
Multisite uninstall support, removing tables, options, and cron events across all subsites in the network.
Compact storage for post content changes, reducing database size for large posts (experimental).
Failed login throttling to protect the database from brute-force attacks — logs the first 100 failed attempts, then automatically skips the rest (experimental).

Changed

WP-CLI --user argument renamed to --userid and --exclude_user to --exclude_userid to avoid conflict with WP-CLI’s global --user argument.
Dashboard widget redesigned with an activity stats summary showing event counts for today and last 7 days, and a more compact event list. Loads significantly faster by limiting queries to the last 7 days and skipping the total count query.
Search now only searches the visible event message text by default, making results more relevant and dramatically faster on sites with large activity logs (experimental).
Multi-word search now matches each word independently across all searchable fields (experimental).
“Show filters” / “Hide filters” toggle replaces “Show search options” / “Collapse search options”.
Action links (Edit, View, Preview, Revisions) now appear below post events.
IP address popover redesigned with prominent IP display, AS number links, map service links (Google Maps and OpenStreetMap), and subnet filtering.
Core file integrity restored log entry now shows how many files are still modified.
Auto backfill runs on the first admin page load instead of WP-Cron, ensuring it works in more environments.
Admin bar JavaScript reduced by removing the wp-components dependency, saving ~919 KB on every page load.
Object caching added to stats queries, preventing duplicate database queries within the same request.

Fixed

False-positive core file integrity warnings on localized WordPress installs (e.g. sv_SE) caused by hardcoded en_US checksums.
Term names showing backslash before apostrophes when editing categories and tags.
Incomplete option cleanup on plugin uninstall, leaving orphaned options in the database.
Three scheduled cron events not cleared during uninstall (database purge, core file integrity check, log file cleanup).
Missing icon for “Other” initiator type.
Manual backfill memory error on sites with many users, now processed in batches.