Tag Archives: Email Log

Email Log WordPress plugin v1.9.1 released

Just a quick note to let you all know that I have released v1.9.1 of my Email Log WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email that is sent from WordPress.

This released fixed a minor security bug that allows logged-in unprivileged users to view content of the logged email.

Since it is a security fix, it is a mandatory update.

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Email Log WordPress plugin v1.9 released

I just released version 1.9 of my Email Log WordPress plugin. This released fixed an issue with pagination while viewing log files and various improvements at code level.

About Email Log WordPress plugin

Email Log is a WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email sent through WordPress and provides a UI where you can view them. The logged emails can be searched based on date, email address or subject.

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How To Properly Create Tables In WordPress Multisite Plugins

Recently, I added full WordPress Multisite compatibility to my Email Log WordPress plugin and during the process, I learned a lot about how to create and handle tables in WordPress Multisite plugins. I thought of documenting it here so that it would be useful for other plugin authors.

Creating tables in Single site installations

Before we get into WordPress Multisite, first let’s see how we can create a table in a single site WordPress installation. You have to hook into the register_activation_hook action, which will be called every time you activate your plugin and then check if your table exists or not. If it doesn’t exist, then you can create your table.

The following code shows how you can do it.

The above code will work even in WordPress Multisite installations, if your plugin will be activated individually for each blog. But if your plugin is networked activated, then the above code will create the table only for the primary blog.

Creating tables for all blogs in a WordPress Multisite installation

Now that we know how to create the table for a single blog, let’s see how we can create the table for all the blogs in a WordPress Multisite installation. Even in this case, we have to hook into the same register_activation_hook action, but should loop through all the blogs in the network.

The following code shows how you can do it.

Creating table when a new blog is created

The above code will create the table only for the blogs that were created before the plugin got network activated. We should also make sure that we create the table for every new that gets created. In order to do that we can hook into the wpmu_new_blog action.

The following code shows how you can do it.

Deleting the table when a blog is deleted

Now that we are creating the table for every new blog, it is our job to make sure that the table is deleted when the blog is deleted. In order to do that, we can hook into the wpmu_drop_tables filter.

The following code shows how you can do it.

Querying the correct table

When we are querying the table, we should always use $wpdb->prefix . $table_name. If we do that, then WordPress will automatically query the correct table based on the current blog. We don’t have to manually find out the blog id and add it to the table name.

Now your plugin should be completely compatible with WordPress Multisite 🙂

Alternate approach

If you look into the above code closely, you will notice that we are creating one table for each blog in the network. For most WordPress Multisite installations, this shouldn’t be a problem. But some WordPress Multisite installation may have thousands and even hundreds of thousands of blogs. In those cases, we might end up creating huge amount tables which might become a bottleneck. Also my plugin needed just one table. Some plugins might need more than one table, which might also increase the number of tables that gets created.

One alternate approach is to create just one table for all blogs and then separate out data for each blog using a blog_id column. While querying the table, we can filter out based the blog_id column.

If I had started my plugin from scratch, I would have done that instead of creating separate tables.

Update: As Damian pointed out below in the comments, if you are using this approach, then you used use $wpdb->base_prefix to get the main prefix and not the individual sites prefix.

Removing the tables when the plugin is deleted

The other thing to keep in mind is that we should delete all the tables when the plugin is deactivated and deleted. I will write a separate article explaining how we should do that.

With WordPress Multisite becoming more popular these days, I hope this information was useful to you. Do let me know if you have any question or comments. Also you can checkout the entire code of my Email Log plugin in github.

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Email Log plugin is now fully WordPress Multisite compatible

I just released version 1.7 of my Email Log WordPress plugin, which adds full compatibility with WordPress Multisite.

About Email Log WordPress plugin

Email Log is a WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email sent through WordPress and provides a UI where you can view them. The logged emails can be searched based on date, email address or subject.

WordPress Multisite compatibility

Earlier versions of Email Log plugin had some compatibility with WordPress Mu (older version of multisite), but I didn’t test it for long time. Also when WordPress Mu got merged into WordPress core, certain things have changed and my plugin was not fully compatible after that.

I came to know about it recently and then started to work on it to make it fully compatible with WordPress Multisite, since I have moved this blog to WordPress Multisite as well. I also learned a lot about WordPress Multisite during the process and will write a separate blog article about it soon. Update: As promised, here is the new blog article explaining how to properly create tables in WordPress Multisite plugins.

Dev Time

This release took me about 2.5 hours of development time. You can find more details about the dev time tracking which I have recently started doing in a separate blog post.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

Try out the Plugin and if you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Log every email send through WordPress

As promised, I have created a new Plugin called Email Log which will log every email that is being sent through WordPress. This Plugin will be very useful, while debugging issues related to email and will also let you to find out whether any spammer is abusing your WordPress installation. This Plugin is also MU compatible and can be used in WordPress MU installations also.

Features

Viewing logged emails

The logged emails will be stored in a separate table and can be viewed from the admin interface. While viewing the logs, the emails can be filtered or sorted based on the date, to address, subject etc.

Deleting logged emails

In the admin interface, all the logged emails can be delete in bulk or can also be selectively deleted based on date, to address, subject.

Cleaning up db on uninstall

As recommended by Ozh, the Plugin has uninstall hook which will clean up the database when the Plugin is uninstalled.

Screenshots

The following screenshot shows how the logged emails will be displayed

view-wordpress-email-logs

This screenshot shows how the email logs could be filtered or sorted.

wordpress-email-log-filter-options

This one shows how the email logs could be deleted.

wordpress-email-log-delete-options

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment