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Jeff Chandler

A New Project by Nick Haskins, WP Status Page

WP Status Page Featured Image
photo credit: Luigi Rosa has moved to Ipernity – cc

The creator of Aesop Story Engine, Nick Haskins, wants to know if there is any interest in a WordPress plugin that would provide a project status page. After browsing the WordPress plugin directory and coming up empty, Haskins is developing his own solution in the form of a plugin.

He describes the plugin will have a similar setup to StatusPage.io. “It would definitely have a mechanism to determine if a supplied URL and/or database is down or not. But the page would be more “alive” then a static coming soon page with the ability to send notifications (email/SMS) to users in addition to showing real-time status updates with a history of events,” Haskins told the Tavern.

Haskins explains how the plugin would work. “You’d provide a subset of items like maybe a URL, database , API endpoint, and we’d ping that and return the status in a pretty way. I think the key making this really work would be to provide some level of automation as in, a developer could push a commit to Github or Bitbucket with a specific tag that would then automatically update a message status on the status page.

An example of a status page is the Amazon Web Services health dashboard. Haskins says his page will look similar but will have a better design.

Amazon Web Services Status Page
Amazon Web Services Status Page

One of the issues he brings up is where to host the plugin. It doesn’t make sense to host a status page on the same server as the project. Instead of forcing users to sign up for a cheap hosting account, Haskins may turn it into a hosted service. One option to consider is using OpenShift Online. OpenShift has free accounts available and is Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting platform.

If you’d like to know when the plugin is ready for testing, WP Status Page has a splash page available where you can enter your email address to receive updates on the project’s status.

Is this something you’d be interested in using? What other ideas or features would you like to see in a status page generation plugin? If you already use a service or have custom coded a solution to provide a status page for your project, please share it in the comments.

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7 responses to “A New Project by Nick Haskins, WP Status Page”

  2. A status page is a nifty idea but open sourced solutions already exist: http://www.stashboard.org/ or http://www.system-status-dashboard.com/ can be installed on a $5 DO droplet or on the newly launched atlantic.net $0.99/month SSD VPS instance*.

    My vote is for Nick to concentrate on aesop and continue to polish it, making it work with more themes. Right now it is still quite limited compared to what it could be.

    *
    http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/atlantic-net-launches-0-99month-ssd-based-vps-hosting-service/

    • Hey Robin!
      As of Aesop 1.1 it works with all WordPress themes (we’ve actually had full theme compatibility since 1.0.9). The sprint to 1.1 was a solid 1000 hours of time invested and at this point I feel that we’ve covered most of the areas of interactivity that one would want to build in a story. In the areas that are lacking, we’ve been building a few paid add-on components to fill the gap with one being released this week.

      Feature requests have slowed down so I’m pretty curious to what you have to say. Please do request new features and feedback here https://github.com/bearded-avenger/aesop-core/issues

      The brand new interface introduced along with editable components in ASE 1.1 has put us into a great position to now start putting the pieces together for a hosted solution of Aesop since we feel the plugin has matured close to a point that we comfortable building on.

      Which brings us to WP Status Page. It’s just one small cog in a huge machine that’s being assembled. It’s incredibly important for us to reach users when issues arise with Aesop Hosted, and currently there isn’t a solution that has what we need. And, as a bootstrapped startup, $600 a year for something that we could build and then give back to the WordPress community for free just felt like a better move.

      Anyways, hope this helps to clear up a few things!

  3. Okay. Now I get it :)

    But what if it was more of a service than a self-hosted plugin? For example – again, if I am getting it correctly – given the current idea being kicked around, there could be 100, 1000 or even 1,000,000 different instance of a check of WPTavern.com. I mean who’s to say people wouldn’t want to check other sites. If it’s that easy, why not?

    In any case, even if that’s semi fringe-ish, would it be better to just have a single GOTO.com where I could check / search “wptavern.com” and I, and anyone else, could get an answer. One ping – many search to see what that bing says. Perhaps I can save X to my profile? Or perhaps there’s a Top 10 list, or Top 10 By First Initial. Or something as simple as GOTO..com/wptavern-com (or similar). That is the domain is the slug / name.

    I like the idea. I’m just thinking of it being implemented slightly differently. Just a thought. I know. I know. Easier said than done. Sorry ;)

    • The issue with a downorjustme.com type service is that it’s not alive, has no way of reaching your users, no ability to leave status updates, and is pretty generalized. There are four main needs as of now:

      – show status of a URL whether up or down
      – ability for you to add custom items and assign a status
      – ability do post updates
      – ability to send messages to subscribed users

      Unfortunately there isn’t anything we’ve found that does those things, is open sourced, and has a beautiful design bringing it out of the 1990’s status board designs.

  5. Perhaps the best solution here, would be to have users self-host it, but have each of those plugins talk to one another, and crowd source the monitoring of each others sites. So you never monitor your own site, but request that other sites on the network monitor yours for you. There wouldn’t need to be a central site controlling it, but they could all seamlessly interact with each other and monitor themselves automatically.

    This could provide some really cool geo-tracking of ping times and load times too. There are services which give information about load times in various placed, but a million websites running the plugin could potentially track a lot more locations. I guess the data would be a bit skewed by them mostly running in mega fast data centers, as opposed to home internet connections, but it could still be useful none the less.

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