Christmas is just around the corner, but that’s no reason to stop checking off items on the Orion roadmap. Right now it’s 3 down, and 8 more items to go until March. Today we’ll be talking about the History tool, and how great it is to have it in your daily workflow.
When you’ve got a bunch of websites to manage, it’s inevitable that a bug will slip by from time to time. Even if you run updates on staging websites and perform inspections after each update, something will still break. You will not notice it immediately, but your client will, after a week or so. By then you’d forget where you were last week, let alone which plugins you updated. That’s where the History tool swoops in to save the day.
Orion History
Everything you’re doing on your ManageWP Orion is being logged, so you’d know what you did, and when you did it. An update crashed a website? No problem – just check the History log to see all the work done on that website, and figure out the cause.
This is the moment where the synergy between different Orion tools shines: Let’s say that you installed a plugin that broke the website CSS, but the website is still working. In order to find out when this happened, all you need to do is check the screenshots of your Orion backups. When you find the first screenshot that has a plain text page instead of your pretty page, you’ve found the exact point in time that you can look up in History and connect the dots.
You can access the History tool from the individual website dashboard – just look for it in the side menu.
Improvements Over the Classic ManageWP History
Orion History gives you more depth. If you updated a plugin, it tells you the old and new version, as well as the name of the plugin. Database optimization tells you how many megabytes have been removed.
We also have future development plans for the History tool. Namely, you will be able to export the history into a CSV file if you need to store the information offline, or maybe use it in your reports. The export feature is as low priority as it can get, so you probably won’t see it before March. This gives us ample time to figure out further improvements for this tool. We’ve already heard some ideas from our beta testers, but if you can think of a way your life could be easier with an improved History tool, let us know in the comments below!
Happy Holidays!
petaqui
Great news guys! Really useful 🙂 And as I said in this comment ( https://managewp.com/history-tool-added-to-orion#comment-348561 ) , tracking everything would be even better.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for the feedback, and enjoy your holidays! 🙂
brian
This is all great, but scheduled reporting to our clients would really justify the value of your product.
Thanks.
Nemanja Aleksic
Already on the roadmap!
http://managewp.com/what-is-orion#roadmap
john.defusco
History looks great. Will all history be available? Or will older records be deleted like on the old interface?
Nemanja Aleksic
The Orion history stores all actions, indefinitely.
kontakt
You should combine this with something like Simple History:
https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/simple-history/
Only when all actions are recorded it will be really useful.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for your input, it’s definitely something we’re considering for a while.
Do you also log custom actions, or is the out-of-the-box list enough for you?
Carl Taylor
This is a great first step. Question though… what about changes and things that are done not in Orion but from the WordPress Admin or file changes via FTP?
At the moment we rely on Sucuri’s logs for this but I’d rather have it all in one place because Sucuri doesn’t log Orion actions
Nemanja Aleksic
Only the Orion actions are logged, at least for now.
We’ve been thinking about logging every action from the wp-admin dashboard as well, as a form of an audit log. The technology is definitely there, so it’s something we can build.
petaqui
That would be awesome! Because sometimes we change lines in the editor throught the wordpress panel (for themes, or plugins…) so in this way would be easier to track everything 🙂