Audit Trail Plugin

Oct 31, 2006 | Tags: , , | Written by Administrator

Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

To summarize:

  • Log of user actions inside your blog - useful for finding out who did what in a multi-user system
  • Post/page revisions and restorations - every change to a post or page is recorded and can be instantly restored to a previous version
  • Differences are shown graphically
  • Extensible, allowing other plugins the ability to add and display items in the Audit Trail
  • Ability to track registered user page visits
  • Fully localized

Version History

  • 1.0.10 - Only include prototype on AT pages
  • 1.0.9 - WP 2.5 compatability
  • 1.0.8 - Show log items according to blog timezone offset
  • 1.0.7 - Fix favicon.ico logs, ignore certain users, track failed login attempts
  • 1.0.6 - Fix warning, allow searching by username

Installation

The plugin is simple to install:

  1. Download audit-trail.zip
  2. Unzip
  3. Upload audit-trail directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory
  4. Go to the plugin management page and enable the plugin

You can find full details of installing a plugin on the plugin installation page.

NOTE: If you are upgrading from a pre 1.0 version please de-activate and then re-activate the plugin. This will upgrade your database tables (unfortunately any existing Audit Trail data will be lost).

Usage

Once the plugin is installed then your actions are already being recorded. You can view the Audit Trail log from the Manage/Audit Trail page.

Log

Note that some entries in the log can be clicked and will expand to show more details.

Post & Page history

The Audit Trail plugin records the entire post everytime it is changed. This can then be used to provide a version history along with the capability of restoring a post to a previous version through this interface which appears on appropriate posts:

Previous versions

Usage is simple. Select the version you wish to view, click the 'view' button and examine the contents of the post. From here you choose to restore this version, delete it, or close the contents.

Restoring a post to a previous version will be recorded in the Audit Trail logs just like any other change. If you decide you don't like the restored version you can always restore back to another version.

NOTE: Installing the Audit Trail plugin in a blog with existing posts will mean that you have no revision history until a post has been changed at least twice (there is no log before the plugin, and there is little point allowing a restoration to the same version as is currently live)

Options

From the options page you can configure exactly what actions are audited. Any plugins that support Audit Trail will also display themself here.

Permissions

Users with the 'edit_plugins' or 'audit_trail' capability can view and administer the Audit Trail plugin. The 'audit_trail' capability can be added with the Role Manager plugin.

Support

Please direct all support questions to the Audit Trail support forum. Any support questions left on this page may not be answered.

Bugs & New Features

A full list of all bugs can be found in the Audit Trail issue tracker.

A full list of all requested features can be found in the Audit Trail feature tracker.

Date Current requested features
31 Jan 2008 Include meta-data in version history
31 Jan 2008 Option to show version history for visitors
Share This

Comments (page 7 of 9)

  1. author
    JP :

    Nov 8, 2007 1:36 pm

    Great plugin --- is there any way to upgrade without losing existing audit trail data?

  2. John (author) :

    Nov 6, 2007 5:25 am

    Dalton, fixed

    Violet, I've added the ability to search by username. Searching by IP is more tricky, so I've left that out for now.

  3. author
    violet :

    Nov 1, 2007 4:44 pm

    I really have a tremendous appreciation for Audit Trail! One minor enhancement I would love to see is the ability to search IP addresses. Thanks so much for all your efforts!

  4. dalton :

    Nov 1, 2007 2:01 pm

    This is brilliant. The best. It's working for me 99%, but for one thing:

    Under the audit trail attached to the post edit view, some of the entries have the following error:

    Warning: assert() [function.assert]: Assertion failed in /home/storyc/public_html/beta/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/audit-trail/lib/Text/Diff/Engine/native.php on line 202

    But then the previous version is still displayed afterward.

    By the way, have you ever heard of Zensor? You guys should get together, you could build the greatest moderation queue plugin ever.

    Regards,
    Dalton

  5. Steve :

    Oct 30, 2007 10:55 am

    Never mind. For some reason, the zip didn't completely unpack. Downloading it again got the whole thing.
    thanks

  6. Steve :

    Oct 30, 2007 10:48 am

    Hi, I tried to install the plugin, but received the following error when trying to activate it: Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

    I am running version 2.2.2. Any ideas before I dig into the code?

  7. John (author) :

    Oct 25, 2007 10:12 pm

    I can't reproduce this problem, Dan. I've tried viewing the versions in FireFox, Safari, IE6, IE7, and Opera, and they all work without any errors. Are you using a different browser?

  8. John (author) :

    Oct 23, 2007 2:03 am

    I don't have time to look into this problem just yet but I will do soon

  9. author
    Dan :

    Oct 22, 2007 3:24 pm

    Hello...is there anyone out there?

  10. author
    Dan :

    Oct 19, 2007 10:29 am

    So the reason I'm not seeing the post view seems to be related to a JavaScript error:

    Line: 326
    Char: 1
    Error: Object expected
    Code: 0
    URL: http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=9

Leave a comment


XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Home | Software | Terms & Conditions | Sitemap | John Godley © 2008
Close
E-mail It