Internal Activity Log

A WordPress plugin that tracks user activity and displays it as interactive charts and a filterable log table in the admin dashboard.

Features

• Activity tracking — automatically captures the following events:
  • User login, logout, failed login, registration, profile update, deletion, password reset
  • Post/page created, published, updated, trashed, untrashed, deleted (all post types)
  • Media uploaded and deleted
  • Comments posted, trashed, spammed, unspammed
  • Plugins activated and deactivated
  • Settings/options updated (admin-side only, deduplicated)
• Dashboard with date range filtering
  • Six quick-access preset buttons: Last 7 / 14 / 30 / 90 days, This month, This year
  • Custom from/to date picker; active preset is highlighted; range capped at 366 days
  • Date-independent stat cards (always show current totals): Total Events (all time), Most Active User (all time), Active Users Today
  • Date-dependent stat cards (reflect selected range): Total Events (selected range), Most Active User (selected range)
  • Horizontal bar chart — top 10 most active users in the selected range
  • Line chart — daily event volume for the selected range (zero-filled)
  • Doughnut chart — event breakdown by action type for the selected range
• Full log table — paginated WP_List_Table with filters by username, action type, and date range; all filters auto-apply on change
• Data stored in a dedicated custom DB table (wp_activity_log) with indexes for fast querying

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+
• PHP 8.0+
• MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.3+

Installation

1. Upload the internal-activity-log folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin via Plugins → Installed Plugins.
3. On activation the wp_activity_log table is created automatically.
4. Navigate to Activity Log in the WP admin sidebar.

Uninstall

Deactivating the plugin keeps your data intact. To permanently delete all log data, uninstall the plugin via WP admin — this drops the wp_activity_log table and removes the ial_db_version option.

File structure

internal-activity-log/
├── internal-activity-log.php      # Plugin bootstrap & hook registration
├── includes/
│   ├── class-installer.php        # DB table creation / teardown
│   ├── class-logger.php           # WP action hooks → log writer
│   ├── class-query.php            # Read / aggregate from DB
│   ├── class-admin.php            # Admin menu, asset enqueueing, page renders
│   └── class-log-table.php        # WP_List_Table subclass
├── admin/
│   ├── views/
│   │   ├── page-dashboard.php     # Dashboard template
│   │   └── page-log.php           # Log list template
│   ├── js/
│   │   └── dashboard.js           # Chart.js initialization
│   └── css/
│       └── admin.css              # Scoped admin styles
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── README.md

Architecture decisions

Security

• All DB reads use $wpdb->prepare().
• All output is escaped with esc_html, esc_url, esc_attr.
• Admin pages check current_user_can('manage_options') before rendering.
• IP addresses are validated with filter_var(FILTER_VALIDATE_IP) before storing.