Code Styling Project » WordPress Plugin: WP System Health (en)

WordPress Plugin: WP System Health (en)

WordPress Version:	WordPress 2.7 or higher
PHP Version:	PHP 4.4.2 or higher
tested Browser:	IE7 \| FireFox 2.0.0.16 \| Opera 9.27 \| Safari (Windows) 3.1.2 \| Google Chrome
not supported Browser:	none known yet

Very often i had a lot of service request belong to not proper working installations of WordPress or not valid configured servers. Furthermore most of the Blog owner are not enough experienced to provide the requested information to continue with help. That’s why i decide to write a small Dashboard Widget showing all the most important values need to know about an WordPress installation.

Requirements and Limitations

This Dasboard widget requires a WordPress version equal or higher than 2.7 and a PHP version of 4.4.3 and higher. This Dashboard extension only displays some information but doesn’t change them nor provides any changing capabilities. It’s also limit to users that are member of the group “Administrator”. All other user won’t get this Widget in their Dashboard and the widget doesn’t collect any data in this case.

Future plans

As you can see, the plugin contains no translation option. This is subject of next releases. Also the amount of information shown at Dashboard will become configurable in future and will be defined by an addtional backend page. This will also introduce the first interaction and modification options to aid the system, if something went wrong.

Small Showcase

Here are the screenshots illustrating the 4 categories the Widget shows. Each category contains more information as you get initially presented. They can be expanded to get a more detailed overview about your system.

I got a small amount of replies about warnings presented, that a call to PHP function exec has been denied for security reasons. This mostly occures, if your provider is massive restrictive with functions you can use at your PHP code. That’s why the version 1.1.3 notices this fact and avoids using this. You will alternatively get such a “System” Tab with additional information:

Installation

Uncompress the download package
Upload folder including all files and sub directories to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Navigate to your Dashboard and enjoy status informations

Download

actual version: wp-system-health-1.1.5.zip (1702 downloads)
(The plugin is also hostet at wordpress.org Plugin Repository and subject of automatic plugin update.)

professional setup extension

Caution: This section is for experienced user that are knowing what they are doing! The plugin can show extra capabilities but will set your blog out of function, if it’s not done properly.

You may have noticed a difference between my System Tab at screenshot and your shown one. You will initially get as first Checkpoint something like this:

This is normal and can’t be done automatically. To get the initial amount of memory PHP consumes before the WordPress core is starting you have to insert into your wp-config.php an additional line between the definition of ABSPATH constant and loading the wp-settings.php.
Because this depends on your installation (the location of your plugin directory) please adjust the sample shown below to meet your installation environment.

PHP
1
2
3
4
define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-content/plugins/wp-system-health/boot-loader.php');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');
?>
timing: 0.085s

PHP
1 2 3 4	define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/'); require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-content/plugins/wp-system-health/boot-loader.php'); require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php'); ?>
timing: 0.085s

The important part is the line, where the boot-loader.php out of this plugin’s directory have to be required once. If it’s proper done, you will get at your Dashboard now the correct startup memory consume of PHP environment.
Attention: As said in the caution box, do it with care! Also remember, once you have successful done this and you want to delete the plugin from your webspace, that the additional line have to be removed too!

I hope, this Plugin may also be helpful for your service desk operations, it definitely reduces the time spend to get informations from somebody not experienced.