If you deactivate plugins you can access them some time under the “Recently active” link in the plugin list table.
“Recently” is not a very specific statement. So how long are deactivated plugins assumed to be “recent”? To find this out we have to take a look at the source code. In wp-admin/plugins.php line 166 the option “recently_activated” gets updated if a plugin is deactivated:
if ( ! is_network_admin() )
update_option( 'recently_activated', array( $plugin => time() ) +
(array) get_option( 'recently_activated' ) );
The option contains an associative array containing the path to the main file of the plugin as the key and the time the plugins have been deactivated (as a unix timestamp) stored as a serialized value:
| 183 | recently_activated |
a:1:{s:21:"hello-dolly/hello.php";i:1357900255;} |
Before the plugin table is created the time stamp is used to determine the “recently active” plugins (wp-admin/includes/class-wp-plugins-list-table.php line 76):
$recently_activated = get_option( 'recently_activated', array() );
foreach ( $recently_activated as $key => $time )
if ( $time + WEEK_IN_SECONDS < time() )
unset( $recently_activated[$key] );
update_option( 'recently_activated', $recently_activated );
The code is walking through all plugin names stored in "recently_activated" and removes those which are older than one week and saves the others back in the options table.
So the answer to the question is: WordPress defines "recently" as one week.
Comments
6 responses to “How recent is “recently”?”
That’s good information to know. Let me see if I can find somewhere applicable to put that in the Codex. Thanks!
Interesting experience. I’ve been thinking “recently” = 12 hrs, the same amount of time when WP checks for updates. It should be better if WP lets us change that time (just for fun, because I don’t see any value of that in reality).
During debugging, I deactivated several and then figured that tab would be an easy place to reactivate them.
I was wondering why plug-ins that I deactivated several days ago were still in there with the ones I just deactivated. Now I know. 🙂
LOL… I, like many others, just took ‘recently’ for granted never thinking to get a defined time fame. Great tip…I’ll file this under the “Why did I not investigate this sooner” category;)
Very good post..
To tell you the truth I am not good with scripts and codes but liked to read your post as it increased my knowledge.