Feature request – installed/activated date

  • Resolved Diabolo

    (@cebuss)


    4 years, 5 months ago

    Just stumbled over this plugin, looks good (just replaced a plugin I was using with this one!), thanks for providing it to the community 🙂

    I’ve been investigating a couple of plugins that looked like they’d give the functionality I require. I was hoping you’d consider this feature request to add another column (or two) in which case it can also replace the other one that is pretty ancient (last updated 9 years ago). That plugin being “Plugin Activation Date“, if you could incorporate that information it would be fantastic.

    Regards.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Roy Tanck

    (@roytanck)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Thanks for your suggestion. Plugin installation and activation dates aren’t recorded by WordPress. The plugin you mention, once activated, does this by writing timestamps to the options table. If I would add this to Plugin Report, it’d initially have no data.

    What are you using this data for? Activation date appears to be reset when a plugin is temporarily deactivated, which is often done to troubleshoot issues.

    Thread Starter Diabolo

    (@cebuss)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Hi Roy

    Yes, I realise the install/activation date doesn’t “come out of the box” with WordPress and perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way still being fairly new to things, but being fairly new I tend to throw in a lot of plugins to test out and see which looks to suit best (hence replacing “Plugins Last Updated Column” with this one 🙂 ).

    IMHO a comprehensive audit trail is always a valuable tool to have, ideally I’d have a record of what plugins (your plugin meets that requirement to a T with the export being above and beyond the other one), when a plugin was installed (not as easy as I imagined, the referenced plugin looks like the closest available but not ideal, as you’ve already noticed it updates on activation/deactivation – ideally it would maintain the first activation as the “install” date as well as the latest activated/deactivated date) and why it was installed (using “Plugins Notes Plus” for that).

    Usage of the data being those “When did I install that and what on earth for?” moments when coming back to a project months later. This feature request particularly helpful for troubleshooting those calls that regardless of how much testing before implementing new functionality are bound to come when an outlier situation occurs “Well it was working two weeks ago when I last did it!”.

    Again, I’m maybe just overthinking things as I tend to do.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Diabolo. Reason: Typo
    Plugin Contributor Roy Tanck

    (@roytanck)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    Plugin Report aims to give you an overview of the “health” of your currently installed plugins. I feel that keeping track of “historical” changes is out of its scope.

    If you’re looking to keep such a log, there are a number of excellent plugins for that. I like Simple History for instance.

    As for notes on decisions like you describe, I’d probably tend to keep those somewhere outside of the site. Every plugin you install is a potential security risk, so info that’s just for you could just go in a document somewhere?

    Thread Starter Diabolo

    (@cebuss)

    4 years, 5 months ago

    No worries, thanks for the consideration (and especially the speed of your responses, impressive!).

    Enjoy the rest of your day 🙂

    PS I actually use Simple History was just looking for a more “one-stop-shop” type of solution.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Diabolo. Reason: To mark as resolved
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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