We want Simple History to be fast. Simple History is an activity log (audit log) plugin for WordPress — it records what users and plugins do on a site. It runs on over 300,000 websites, and a logging plugin that slows down 300,000 websites would be a pretty bad logging plugin. So we treat performance…
For 13 years we had the same screenshots on our wordpress.org plugin page. The first thing a potential user sees. And it was 13 years old! Also: low resolution. Ouch. But how come it took so long for us to update them? Well, because we are lazy. And updating them was time consuming and boring:…
If you’re building AI-powered tools that read your WordPress activity log — whether it’s a Claude Code skill, a custom GPT, or any LLM-based agent — you’ll want to keep API responses as small as possible. Every extra byte costs tokens, and tokens cost money and context window space. Here are a few tips we…
We recently gave Claude Code their own account on this website. Giving an LLM access to your website can sure be scary. But also… very useful! While we do like to create our blog posts manually there are many things that an LLM can do more efficiently than a human. In our case we let…
A week ago, on a local test website on mine, WooCommerce suddenly got updated. Now this was a bit strange since I do not have auto-update enabled for WooCommerce and I did not perform an update. This is how it looked in the Simple History log. Just like a regular plugin update. I had not…
Did you know that according to the WordPress.org plugin guidelines, a plugin is not allowed to track a user without their consent. That’s a good rule that sometimes plugin authors break. Sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. So you can understand that this debug message in Simple History with the Debug & Monitor add-on installed caught…
In the just released WordPress 6.9 there is a new feature that makes it possible for users to hide blocks. It’s a convenient feature to use when you want to hide a block for a period of time instead of deleting it completely. In this post we’ll show you how you can detect such block…
The next version of WordPress (WP 6.9) will extend the already useful Command Palette to be available on all screens – meaning you can quickly navigate to your site history with only your keyboard from any admin page.
The Simple History community has been asking for practical examples of how to extend the plugin’s functionality, particularly around forwarding log entries to external systems. Following community feedback in issue #427, we’ve published a dedicated github.com/bonny/simple-history-examples that demonstrates how to do this. What’s in the Examples Repository The new repository at github.com/bonny/simple-history-examples contains a fully…
Tracking user activity in WordPress is essential for security, debugging, and content management. Simple History makes this easy by logging key events, and with the power of the WordPress REST API, you can integrate these logs into almost any workflow. In this guide, we’ll explore how to fetch Simple History logs and display them in…