WordPress is finally getting a "who's online" feature and honestly it's about time
1. The problem – In multi-author WordPress sites, editors often unknowingly work on the same post simultaneously or overwrite each other’s changes because there’s no real-time awareness of who is editing what.
2. WordPress has a post locking system, but it only warns you after you’ve already opened a post, by which time you may have already started making conflicting edits.
3. A feature plugin called Presence API was published to the WordPress.org plugin directory in April (not yet in core).
4. The plugin introduces a “Who’s Online” dashboard widget, an avatar stack in the admin bar, an Editors column in the post list (shows active editors before you open a post), and an “Online” filter on the Users list.
5. It uses the existing Heartbeat API and stores presence data in a dedicated table with a 60‑second TTL. A separate table was necessary because storing ephemeral data in shared cache tables was wiping site‑wide cache on every heartbeat tick (discovered during WordPress 7.0 development).
6. The plugin is still experimental (not recommended for production sites). You can try it via a Playground demo, and the core team is actively collecting feedback in the #feature-presence-api Slack channel.
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1. The problem – In multi-author WordPress sites, editors often unknowingly work on the same post simultaneously or overwrite each other’s changes because there’s no real-time awareness of who is editing what.
2. WordPress has a post locking system, but it only warns you after you’ve already opened a post, by which time you may have already started making conflicting edits.
3. A feature plugin called Presence API was published to the WordPress.org plugin directory in April (not yet in core).
4. The plugin introduces a “Who’s Online” dashboard widget, an avatar stack in the admin bar, an Editors column in the post list (shows active editors before you open a post), and an “Online” filter on the Users list.
5. It uses the existing Heartbeat API and stores presence data in a dedicated table with a 60‑second TTL. A separate table was necessary because storing ephemeral data in shared cache tables was wiping site‑wide cache on every heartbeat tick (discovered during WordPress 7.0 development).
6. The plugin is still experimental (not recommended for production sites). You can try it via a Playground demo, and the core team is actively collecting feedback in the #feature-presence-api Slack channel.
#Blog
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