The WordPress users sessions management feature in WP Activity Log is one of the most used features. Many use it to see who is logged in to their websites, and what they are doing in real time. Others, especially subscription and membership site owners use it to limit or block multiple users sessions.
That’s why we are so excited to introduce WP Activity Log 4.1. Here is what we’ve built in 4.1 and improved.
The all new user sessions management module
Up until version 4.0.4, WP Activity Log relied on WordPress to show you who is logged in to your website.
However, this method was slow and had a lot of limitations. WordPress saves the session data in the wp_usermeta table, alongside much more user information. So for the plugin to show who is logged in, it had to parse too much data, most of which it did not use. This made the process very slow, and on big websites, it was impossible to retrieve the complete list of logged in users.
So in this update we have built an all new users sessions management feature which uses its own data and does not rely on WordPress data. Even better, the new module maintains the WordPress session data and keeps the database cleaner.
New configurable users sessions policies per role
Since the new users sessions module is much faster, now it is possible to configure users sessions policies per role. You can limit and block multiple users sessions based on their roles.
You can also configure a policy in the plugin to terminate idle users sessions after a certain time based on role.
Breaking change: with the introduction of the new policies, which can be configured differently for different roles, the old configured policies cannot be migrated. So if you are upgrading from an earlier version of the plugin, the previously configured policies will be lost. Please reconfigure them.
Other major improvements in update 4.1
In this update we have also:
- Added a new setting to configure the log files folder (by default the plugin saves log files in /wp-uploads/wp-security-audit-log/ ),
- We moved more of the plugin’s settings to the wp_options table, so it can load the settings much faster,
- Removed more obsolete code, which was used for when updating from versions prior to 3.2.3.
For a complete detailed list of all that is new, improved and fixed in this update refer to the plugin changelog.
Limit or block multiple users sessions on your WordPress
Do you manage a membership or subscription website? Do you want to limit, control and block multiple users’ sessions? Get started today with WP Activity Log.