Stream – Activity Log & Audit Trail

Description

Stream is a complete activity log and audit trail for your WordPress site: see what changed, who changed it, and when. From plugin activations to post edits, login attempts to new user creation, every user and system action is recorded in an audit log built for debugging, security monitoring, and compliance.

Every logged action is displayed in an activity stream and organized for easy filtering by User, Role, Context, Action or IP address. Admins can highlight entries in the activity log—such as suspicious user activity—to investigate what’s happening in real time. Stream also lets you configure email alerts and webhooks for integrations like Slack and IFTTT, so your team knows the moment something goes wrong.

Stream keeps its own logs healthy too: records are automatically purged on the retention schedule you choose, with batched deletion and orphaned-data cleanup that stay reliable even on very large sites.

Stream is also AI-ready: its abilities are exposed through the WordPress Abilities API and MCP Adapter, so AI assistants and other tools can securely query your site’s activity records.

For advanced users, Stream supports a network view of all activity records on your Multisite, exclude rules to ignore certain kinds of user activity, and a WP-CLI command for querying records.

Stream is free and fully open source — development happens in the open on GitHub, maintained by XWP.

With Stream’s powerful activity logging, you’ll have the information you need to responsibly manage your WordPress sites.

Built-In Tracking Integrations For Popular Plugins:

• Advanced Custom Fields
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Gravity Forms
• Jetpack
• Two Factor
• User Switching
• WooCommerce
• Yoast SEO

Built-In Tracking For Core Actions:

• Posts
• Pages
• Custom Post Types
• Users
• Themes
• Plugins
• Tags
• Categories
• Custom Taxonomies
• Settings
• Custom Backgrounds
• Custom Headers
• Menus
• Media Library
• Widgets
• Comments
• Theme Editor
• WordPress Core Updates

Other Noteworthy Features:

• Multisite view of all activity records on a network
• Limit who can view user activity records by user role
• Set exclude rules to ignore certain kinds of user activity
• Live updates of user activity records in the Stream
• Export your Activity Stream as a CSV or JSON file
• WP-CLI command for querying records

Configuration

Most of the plugin configuration is available under the “Stream” → “Settings” page in the WordPress dashboard.

Request IP Address

The plugin expects the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable to contain the verified IP address of the current request. On hosting environments with PHP processing behind reverse proxies or CDNs the actual client IP is passed to PHP through request HTTP headers such as X-Forwarded-For and True-Client-IP which can’t be trusted without an additional layer of validation. Update your server configuration to set the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable to the verified client IP address.

As a workaround, you can use the wp_stream_client_ip_address filter to adapt the IP address:

add_filter(
    'wp_stream_client_ip_address',
    function( $client_ip ) {
        // Trust the first IP in the X-Forwarded-For header.
        // ⚠️ Note: This is inherently insecure and can easily be spoofed!
        if ( ! empty( $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ) ) {
            $forwarded_ips = explode( ',' $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] );

            if ( filter_var( $forwarded_ips[0], FILTER_VALIDATE_IP ) ) {
                return $forwarded_ips[0];
            }
        }

        return $client_ip;
    }
);

⚠️ WARNING: The above is an insecure workaround that you should only use when you fully understand what this implies. Relying on any variable with the HTTP_* prefix is prone to spoofing and cannot be trusted!

Known Issues

• We have temporarily disabled the data removal feature through plugin uninstallation, starting with version 3.9.3. We identified a few edge cases that did not behave as expected and we decided that a temporary removal is preferable at this time for such an impactful and irreversible operation. Our team is actively working on refining this feature to ensure it performs optimally and securely. We plan to reintroduce it in a future update with enhanced safeguards.

Contribute

There are several ways you can get involved to help make Stream better:

1. Report Bugs: If you find a bug, error or other problem, please report it! You can do this by creating a new topic in the plugin forum. Once a developer can verify the bug by reproducing it, they will create an official bug report in GitHub where the bug will be worked on.

2. Translate into Your Language: Use the official plugin translation tool to translate Stream into your language.

3. Suggest New Features: Have an awesome idea? Please share it! Simply create a new topic in the plugin forum to express your thoughts on why the feature should be included and get a discussion going around your idea.

4. Issue Pull Requests: If you’re a developer, the easiest way to get involved is to help out on issues already reported in GitHub. Be sure to check out the contributing guide for developers.

Thank you for wanting to make Stream better for everyone!

View contributors here.

Technical details