Audit Trail Plugin

Oct 31, 2006 | Tags: permissions, plugin, wordpress | 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:

Download audit-trail.zip
Unzip
Upload audit-trail directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory
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.

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:

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

Comments (page 9 of 9)

90
audit trail is awesome :
Jul 23, 2008 12:21 pm

Plugin is great!

I was having problems with the ignore functionality. I'm no php expert, but I did this:

Line 78 of auditor.php from:
explode (',', 'ignore');

to:

explode (',', $ignore);
89
baron :
Jun 22, 2008 9:48 am

hi. Thanks for plugin

perfect.

Regards
88
Ryan Williams :
Mar 26, 2008 5:10 pm

Yar, she's righteously broken in WordPress 2.5 — both visually and functionally.
87
Lomes :
Mar 21, 2008 5:14 pm

Would love to know when this supports WP 2.5! Sounds like an awesome plugin.
86
Manne :
Jan 23, 2008 5:11 am

I'm trying to show the version history dropdown on each post (on the blog, not in the admin interface) for logged in users with the right capabilities. Any clues on how this could be done?
85
mark :
Jan 22, 2008 11:29 am

Hey John,

I just wanted to let you know you have a great plugin!
However, with the time issue, you add the gmt offset to the server time, not local time.

I fixed it by editing the audit_trails.php file to add the (local time - server time) offset instead of gmt offset.

Maybe you can address this in the next release.

Thanks!
84
Gina :
Jan 16, 2008 12:09 pm

Hi John,

I installed it for WPMU, and so far its working great, I'll write later if I encounter any problems.
Thank you.
83
John (author) :
Jan 15, 2008 10:18 pm

Gina, I've never used WPMU and don't know what the differences are to be able to say whether it works or not. Let me know either way!

Will, you're right, for some reason the file is 1.0.7. I've updated this to 1.0.8
82
Will :
Jan 14, 2008 10:22 am

Hi there,
I've just downloaded version 1.0.8 of your great plugin.

WordPress' Plugin Management area still says "There is a new version of Audit Trail available. Download version 1.0.8 here."
I had a look at audit-trail.php - it says "Version: 1.0.7" in the header.

Question:
Is your site linking to the wrong zip, or has the version line in audit-trail.php not been updated?

Thanks.
81
Gina :
Jan 11, 2008 7:55 pm

Hi John, I would like to know if this plugin is compatible with the WordPress Multi User version of the blogger.
Thank you.