How to Get an Alert for Theme File Edits in WordPress

Logtivity has a feature called “Alerts” that allows you to receive notifications for important updates on your sites. Alerts can be sent to two Alert Channels: email or Slack.

You can use this feature to get alerts every time a theme filed is edited on one of your sites. This is something that should rarely (if ever) happen to a WordPress site and it can indicate more serious problems such as a hack.

Here’s our guide to getting alerts from Logtivity for theme file edits on your WordPress site. If you haven’t done this yet, you will need to connect your site to Logtivity. Click here for our getting started guide.

Create the Theme File Edit Alerts for One Site

This guide will show you how to get theme file edit alerts for one WordPress site.

Go to “Alerts” in the Logtivity app. Here are the settings you can enter:

  • Action: This is the trigger for the alert. We should enter “Theme File Edited”.
  • Context: This field allows you to specify more information about the Action. Because this alert will notify us about logins, the “Context” field will search on the user role. You can leave this blank in order to get notifications for all edits.
  • User: With this field, you can choose to get notifications for theme file edits by a specific user.

After creating the alert, we recommend that you test the alert by making a small edit to a theme file. This next image shows how the alerts appear in Slack. You can see three buttons underneath the alert:

  • View/Edit Alert: This will take you to the screen where you can update these alerts. It looks very similar to the image above.
  • View Logs: This button will show you all your logs that match “Theme File Edited”.
  • View User: This will display all the activity for the user who triggered this alert.

Create the Theme File Edited Alert for All Your Sites

This guide will show you how to get “Theme File Edited” alerts for all your WordPress sites.

  • Go to “Team Settings” and then “Global Alerts” in the Logtivity app.
  • Enter “Theme File Edited” for the “Action” field. Scroll up in this tutorial for more details on the other fields.
  • Leave the “Context” and “User” fields blank.
  • Click the “Create alert” button.

The Global Alert Channels are handled separately from the Alert Channels for individual sites.

To choose where your Global Alerts will send notifications, go to the “Global Alerts Channel” tab and choose the email address and / or Slack channel.

Global Alert Channels screen