We are very excited to announce the latest release of WP Activity Log. Available from today, this version includes many UX and functional improvements for better stability and operation in a wide range of environments. We have also added a host of new features including additional reports, white labeling options, and mirroring tags, which we discuss in further detail down below:
Improved Reports
Some of the most significant changes in this release are related to the Reports module. We have improved the format and added a number of new statistic reports, and added new white labeling options, for more control over the look and feel of reports generated through WP Activity Log.
New & improved statistics reports
Statistics reports are different from activity reports. Activity reports work as a partial/filtered export from the activity log, listing all activities chosen through the filter. On the other hand, statistics reports automatically work out how many changes of a specific nature happened on your website, making it that much easier to identify any abnormal activity.
For example, you can see how many user profile changes were performed during a specific week or a month. You can also generate a statistics report to see how many new users have registered during a specific period on your website, among others.
Below are some of the new statistics reports being made available:
- Number of user profile changes
- Number of new user registrations and users with specific user role
- List of different IP addresses used by a user
- Number of page views per post
- Number of password resets
Reports white labeling
We have added more Reports white labeling options including custom titles, headers, and the ability to add business name, contact details, and comments to every individual report. You can also add your business logo to the report’s header page, and link the logo to a specific URL to improve the branding on reports.
With this update, the reports’ white labeling options have also been moved to a dedicated page in the Reports section, making them easier to find and manage.
Other release highlights
This release features many improvements and fixes, which we are sure our customers will appreciate. Even so, some of the biggest changes you’ll see in this version include:
Activity log tags for mirrored logs
If you use Loggly or Amazon CloudWatch mirroring, you will now be able to make use of tags. Tags are a metadata entry that effectively allows you to label activity log events for easier organization and filtering within the LMS (Log Management System). This makes it much easier to keep track of which logs are of which site when you have multiple websites writing to the same system.
Refactored import/export settings module
The module used to import and export the WP Activity Log plugin settings has been refactored and now covers more plugin settings. With this update, it is also possible to preview the settings before importing them.
Refactored plugin and database updating module.
In update 4.4.0 we introduced a number of changes to the activity log database tables. Even though we thoroughly tested this update before releasing it, a number of technical issues and limitations were reported.
So in this update, we took the opportunity to refactor the update module and addressed some of the limitations. For example, before this update, administrators could only update to version 4.4.x from 4.3.6. Now, this is no longer the case and updates can be installed from even older versions. However, we still recommend users avoid updating very old plugin installs directly to the latest version. To avoid issues, one should always keep the plugin up to date.
Other noteworthy improvements and fixes
Improved licensing SDK: One update that’s worth mentioning is an improvement to how licensing is handled on large deployments. Previously, some customers experienced time-out issues deploying WP Activity Log Premium on large multisite networks To this end, improvements have been made to license verification that will ensure everything proceeds as smoothly as possible.
Improved sessions table schema: This update features another database table schema update. This time the update is for the sessions table. Now the plugin keeps a record of the session ID in the sessions table. This data is required to accurately apply the WordPress users’ session policies.
Improved WordPress activity log purging tool: The tool to purge WordPress activity log data now gives you the option to choose which data you want to purge. For example, if you search for a specific username, it gives you the option to choose between deleting the data generated by that user or deleting the data in which the user is mentioned. We have also added external database support, which allows you to purge activity log data saved in an external database.
For a complete list of what is new, improved, and fixed in this version of the WP Activity Log plugin, kindly refer to the change log.
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