A New Project by Nick Haskins, WP Status Page

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

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.