Dotance Settings History and Restore

WordPress keeps revisions for posts and pages. It keeps nothing for settings. Save the wrong value on a plugin’s options screen, or watch a colleague change something on Friday evening, and there is no history to go back to.

Dotance Settings History and Restore is that history. It records every real change to the options table made by a logged-in user – in WordPress itself, in any plugin, in any theme – and puts a timeline under Tools → Settings Undo with an Undo button on every entry.

What you see for each change

• Who made it, and when
• Which plugin, theme or WordPress core wrote it
• Which screen it came from – “Settings › Reading”, a plugin’s admin page, the Customizer, a REST route
• The value before and after: short values right on the row (“10 → 12”), arrays as a key-level diff that reaches into nested keys (added, removed and changed), collapsed to what moved
• A short note you can add to any change set, so the timeline says why

Undo and roll back

• Undo one option, or every option a single save touched, in one click
• Checkpoints: save a named marker (“Before the redesign”) and later roll every setting back to how it was at that moment, after a preview of every option and its value
• Roll back one person or one plugin: put back everything a user changed, or everything a plugin or theme wrote, in the last hour, day, week or month
• Update markers: plugin, theme and core updates and activations show up on the timeline, so “what changed after that update?” has an answer and a Roll back button
• Every rollback shows a preview first, flags options that someone else changed afterwards, and is itself recorded, so it can be undone too
• Options that could lock you out – site URL, home URL, active plugins, theme, user roles – ask you to type the option name before they are restored

Know when something critical changes

• Optional email when site URL, home URL, admin email, search-engine visibility, open registration or the default role changes, with who changed it and from which plugin (off by default)
• A “noisy options” hint shows options a plugin rewrites over and over, with one click to ignore them
• An admin-bar menu shows the last few changes and an “Undo the last change set” shortcut

Designed to be quiet

A settings log is only useful if it is readable, so the plugin does not record everything. Transients, cron state, rewrite rules, update-check timestamps, cache keys and plugin version bumps are ignored. One settings form save that writes twelve options is one card in the timeline, not twelve. A plugin that changes a value and puts it straight back within the same request leaves no entry. Changes made by cron, WP-CLI or anonymous requests are off by default and can be switched on, and you can add your own option names (with * wildcards) to the ignore list on the Settings tab.

Safe by default

• Only administrators (manage_options) can view the timeline or undo anything
• Values under keys that look like passwords, tokens or API keys are masked in the display and in exports; the stored value is intact, so an undo still works
• Old rows are pruned daily by age and by row count, both configurable
• Deleting the plugin keeps the history unless you tick “delete data on uninstall”; a “Delete all history” button clears it on demand
• Nothing is sent anywhere. The plugin makes no external requests and loads no remote fonts or scripts; its two typefaces are bundled (SIL Open Font License)

Export, WP-CLI and REST

• Download the filtered history as CSV or JSON, for an audit or a support ticket
• WP-CLI: wp settings-undo list|diff|undo|undo-group|checkpoint|checkpoints|rollback|export|prune|clear
• A read-only REST route (/wp-json/settings-undo/v1/changes) and, on WordPress 6.9+, a read-only Ability for AI assistants. Neither can change a setting.

For developers

• settings_undo_ignored_options – filter an array of option names or * globs to ignore
• settings_undo_max_value_size – filter the byte cap above which a value is logged but not stored (default 512 KB)
• settings_undo_alert_options – filter the options that trigger the critical-change email
• settings_undo_recorded – action fired after a change is stored

Not in this version: multisite network options, and post content (WordPress revisions already cover that).