Recently Chris Reynolds brought up an issue he was experiencing with one of our client projects; he was struggling to compare the current active status for plugins in a multisite network between internal dev servers and a WPEngine staging site so that he could debug some issues that were occurring.
Everyone on the project wondered if there was some easy way that we could get a snapshot of what each install had going on. The only requirement that Chris wanted was an easy copy/paste way to get the cumulative status from each so he could compare side by side. This set my brain running and I was granted the task to explore what could be done to accomplish this.
After some research, I got set out on the task and the end result became “WDS Active Plugin Data.” It is a multi-site dependent plugin that will only show up in the Network Admin settings submenu once activated.
Views
When you visit the settings page, you will be presented with a basic screen that provides three different view links at the top and the initial “Simple” view displayed below.
Simple View
With “Simple” view, you are presented with each plugin listed on their own line and their current status. Status is indicated by either blank space for not active, “[A]” for active, and “[NA]”” for network active right after the plugin name. This is all presented in a basic textarea that is non-editable and will auto-select all of the contents for easy copying.
Advanced View
While probably not THAT advanced, the “Advanced” view is not as compact in its listing compared to “Simple” view. It will list the plugins with two more columns for “Active” and “Network Active.” Each plugin will have its current status indicated by either “true” or “false” in the corresponding column.
Sites List View
The last view we have is the “Sites List” view. With this one, we extrapolate the data and apply it to each site in the network. This will allow you to see which plugins are active in which sites, but does not denote status of “Network activation.” When the plugin is active for a site, its corresponding cell will be green with a checkmark in it, and when inactive, red with an x in it.
Summary
With the three available views, it is easy to see what plugins you have available, and where each is currently active. When working on client work, comparison of the status between development and production sites, or between two development sites is right at your fingertips.
You can find the plugin on our company GitHub page at https://github.com/WebDevStudios/WDS-Active-Plugin-Data or as a direct zip file download.