Sentinel

Dashboard widget displaying the activation status and version of each Intergroup plugin.

Sentinel adds a WordPress admin dashboard widget that monitors the health of the Intergroup plugin suite — Unity, Scrutiny, Integrity, Concordance, and Amber. It shows each plugin's version and active/inactive status at a glance, with automatic AJAX refresh when plugins are activated or deactivated.

License: MIT (Modified — see License) Author: The Bleeding Deacons

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
• Requirements
• Usage
• Architecture
• Building for Production
• License

Features

• Plugin status dashboard — a single widget on the WordPress admin dashboard showing version and activation status for every monitored Intergroup plugin.
• Automatic refresh — the widget updates via AJAX whenever a monitored plugin fires its loaded action or is activated/deactivated, without requiring a full page reload.
• No dependencies — Sentinel has no plugin dependencies; it initialises on plugins_loaded at priority 5 and monitors whatever Intergroup plugins happen to be installed.
• Lightweight — minimal footprint; a single dashboard widget class with bundled CSS and JS.

Installation

From a .zip archive

1. Download or build the sentinel.zip archive.
2. In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Upload the .zip file and click Install Now.
4. Activate the plugin.

Manual installation

1. Clone or copy the sentinel directory into wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin from the WordPress admin.

No configuration is required. The dashboard widget appears automatically once the plugin is active.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+
• PHP 8.1+

Sentinel does not depend on any other Intergroup plugins — it simply monitors whichever ones are installed.

Usage

Once activated, a Plugin Status widget appears on the WordPress admin dashboard. It lists the following plugins with their version and active/inactive badge:

• Unity
• Scrutiny
• Integrity
• Concordance
• Amber

The widget listens for the unity/loaded, scrutiny_loaded, integrity_loaded, concordance/loaded, and amber/loaded action hooks, as well as the core activated_plugin and deactivated_plugin hooks, and refreshes its display automatically.

Architecture

Sentinel is intentionally minimal — a dashboard widget backed by a thin plugin bootstrap and a shared PSR-3 logger that writes to a dedicated database table (wp_sentinel_log_entries).

sentinel/
├── Sentinel.php                     # Plugin bootstrap, hook registration & WP-CLI commands
├── composer.json                    # Dependencies & PSR-4 autoloading
├── build.php                        # Cross-platform build/packaging script
├── uninstall.php                    # Cleanup on plugin deletion
├── assets/
│   ├── dashboard.css                # Widget styles
│   ├── dashboard.js                 # AJAX refresh logic
│   ├── log-viewer.css               # Log viewer page styles
│   └── log-viewer.js                # Log viewer AJAX refresh
└── src/
    ├── Plugin.php                   # Initialisation (admin-only)
    ├── Admin/
    │   ├── DashboardWidget.php      # Widget registration, rendering & AJAX endpoint
    │   ├── LogViewerPage.php        # Tools → Sentinel Logs admin page
    │   └── SettingsPage.php         # Settings → Sentinel options page
    └── Logger/
        ├── sentinel-logger.php     # Shared mu-plugin (deployed to mu-plugins/)
        ├── HasLogger.php            # Convenience trait for other plugins
        └── LoggerManager.php        # Deploy/remove lifecycle for the mu-plugin

Logging

The shared logger (sentinel-logger.php) is deployed as a must-use plugin and stores all log entries in the {prefix}_sentinel_log_entries database table.

Log entries are buffered in memory during each request and flushed to the database in a single bulk INSERT — either when the buffer is full, at shutdown, or via a manual flush. This reduces per-entry DB overhead significantly.

Key configuration constants for wp-config.php:

WP-CLI commands:

wp sentinel deploy-logger   # Deploy/update the mu-plugin
wp log tail                 # Show recent entries (--lines=50 --channel=unity --level=error)
wp log clear                # Truncate the log table
wp log table                # Print the full table name
wp log flush                # Flush the in-memory buffer to the database immediately

Settings

Navigate to Settings → Sentinel to configure uninstall behaviour:

Building for Production

The included build.php script packages the plugin into a distributable .zip archive, stripping development files.

# Production build
php build.php build:production

# Development build (includes tests)
php build.php build:dev

# Clean the build directory
php build.php clean

You can override the version number with --version=X.X and add --clean to wipe the build directory before packaging.

Testing

Install the dev dependencies and run the suite from the plugin directory:

composer install

The suite uses PHPUnit with Mockery and bleedingdeacons/wp-mocks — the suite's shared WordPress test doubles, a state-backed stub layer over Brain Monkey. Line coverage is reported to Coveralls on every CI run — see the coverage badge at the top of this file.

License

MIT License (Modified) — Copyright © 2025 The Bleeding Deacons.

This software is provided under the standard MIT license with one additional restriction: the licensee may not sell the Software, alone or as part of an aggregate software distribution containing the Software.

See LICENSE for the full text.