Creating a Plugin Activation Tracking System
Posted on 16th June 2023
WordPress Plugin Development
In this article, we will be discussing how to create a WordPress Plugin Activation Tracking System. This tracking system will allow you to keep track of how often your plugins are being activated and deactivated by your users. This will allow you to see which plugins are being used the most and which ones are being ignored. This information can be very useful when you are trying to improve your plugins or when you are developing new plugins.
First, you will need to create a new file in your WordPress plugin directory. You can name this file anything you want, but we will be naming it “activation-tracking.php” for this article. Next, you will need to open up this file in a text editor and paste the following code into it:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Activation Tracking
Plugin URI: http://example.com/activation-tracking/
Description: This plugin will track how often your plugins are being activated and deactivated.
Version: 1.0
Author: John Doe
Author URI: http://example.com/
License: GPLv2
*/
?>
This code will create a new plugin called “Activation Tracking”. This plugin will track how often your plugins are being activated and deactivated. The next step is to activate this plugin. You can do this by going to your WordPress admin panel and clicking on the “Plugins” menu. Find the “Activation Tracking” plugin in the list of plugins and click on the “Activate” link. Once the plugin is activated, it will start tracking how often your plugins are being activated and deactivated.
Activation Tracking
The next step is to view the tracking information. You can do this by going to the “Activation Tracking” page in your WordPress admin panel. This page will show you a list of all the plugins that have been activated and deactivated. It will also show you the number of times each plugin has been activated and deactivated. This information can be very useful when you are trying to improve your plugins or when you are developing new plugins.
Plugin
The Activation Tracking plugin is a very useful tool for WordPress plugin developers. It can help you keep track of which plugins are being used the most and which ones are being ignored. This information can be very useful when you are trying to improve your plugins or when you are developing new plugins. If you have any questions about this plugin, feel free to contact me.
Assuming you have a basic understanding of PHP and WordPress plugin development, let’s look at how to create a plugin activation tracking system.
First, you need to create a new WordPress plugin. You can do this by creating a new directory in your WordPress installation’s wp-content/plugins directory. For this example, we’ll call our plugin wp-activation-tracker.
In your new plugin directory, create a new file called wp-activation-tracker.php. The first thing you need to do is add a plugin header to this file. Plugin headers are used by WordPress to display information about your plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
$data,
);
wp_remote_post( $request_url, $request_args );
}
Now that we have our functions in place, we can start tracking plugin activations and deactivations. In our activation tracking function, we’ll simply write the plugin name and activation date/time to our text file.
function wp_activation_tracker_activate( $plugin ) {
$data = sprintf(
‘%s: Plugin activated at %s’,
$plugin,
date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’ )
);
wp_activation_tracker_write_data( $data );
}
In our deactivation tracking function, we’ll write the plugin name and deactivation date/time to our text file.
function wp_activation_tracker_deactivate( $plugin ) {
$data = sprintf(
‘%s: Plugin deactivated at %s’,
$plugin,
date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’ )
);
wp_activation_tracker_write_data( $data );
}
And that’s it! You now have a basic plugin activation tracking system up and running. Of course, you’ll need to customize it to fit your specific needs, but this should give you a good starting point.
Creating a Plugin Activation Tracking System
Now that we have our plugin setup, we need to track when it’s activated. We can do this by using the register_activation_hook() function.
This function takes two arguments: the path to our plugin file and a function to run when the plugin is activated.
In our case, we’ll want to use the wp_register_activation_hook() function, which is a wrapper for the register_activation_hook() function. This function allows us to use WordPress’s built-in functions, like the wp_insert_post() function.
To use this function, we first need to include the wp-load.php file, which will give us access to WordPress’s built-in functions:
include( ABSPATH . ‘wp-load.php’ );
Next, we need to define our activation function. This function will create a new post in our WordPress site. The post will contain information about our plugin and when it was activated:
function my_plugin_activate() {
// Create a new post
$post_id = wp_insert_post( array(
‘post_title’ => ‘My Plugin was Activated’,
‘post_content’ => ‘My Plugin was activated on ‘ . date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’ ),
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘post_author’ => 1,
) );
}
Finally, we need to hook our activation function to the register_activation_hook() function. We do this by passing the path to our plugin file and our activation function to the wp_register_activation_hook() function:
wp_register_activation_hook( __FILE__, ‘my_plugin_activate’ );
Now, whenever our plugin is activated, a new post will be created in our WordPress site.
