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Available updates to WordPress, plugins and themes now logged

With the latest update of Simple History the log will show the available updates to plugins, themes and WordPress core that are found.

This is a great feature to have if you for example subscribe to the history RSS feed. You no longer need to manually check the updates-page to see if there are any updates.

Here you can see how it looks when an update to WordPress is found and then the update is installed. It’s all there in the history log:

available-updates

And here’s how it can look in your RSS-reader when you get notified that WordPress has auto-updated:

updated-logged-in-rss-feed

Creating and editing users: now you can see what changes have been made

Before this version (2.7) of Simple History you could see in the log that a user had been created or changed. But you could not see any details.

With this update however, you can now see a lot of details when a user is created or edited: their username, name, email, webpage, and so on. And when a user is edited you can see from what old value to what new value.

user-created-and-edited

Brute force attacks can make the log big – here’s why and how to stop it

In the support forum for Simple History some people have raised issues about the Simple History database tables are growing large. (For example this thread and this thread.

The reason for this is that Simple History is really good at logging things. So if your WordPress blog is getting a really big amount of brute force attacks, all those failed login attempts will be logged in Simple History. Nothing wrong with that, that’s the purpose of the plugin. But the number of rows can be huge – like over a million for some sites. And that can be an issue for some low cost hosts where you have a limited amount of storage/disk space.

Here’s what Simple History is doing to keep the database small – and a solution to keep the number of login attempts down to a minimum:

(more…) “Brute force attacks can make the log big – here’s why and how to stop it”

Now logs when users resets passwords + easier to see time of event

Version 2.4 of Simple History brings a wanted addition to the event log: when hovering the time of an event the tooltip now displays both the local time and the GMT time of the event. This change makes it easier for admins in different timezones that work together on a site to understand when each event happened.

Screenshot showing both local and GTM time on an event in the Simple History plugin

The update also brings two new logged things:

(more…) “Now logs when users resets passwords + easier to see time of event”