What is the best way to create a change log for my application?

Question

I need to build a simple change log for my application.

I have two tables: Store and Item.
I want to log each time a user updates info on store / item, and each time a user creates / deletes an association between item and store. (A user can associate an item with multiple stores).

The purpose is for the owner of that item, to see who has done any changes to that item.

What is the best way of doing this? I'm trying to avoid using a complicated logging system (since it might be a overkill).

I'm hoping that I can avoid manually calling a function each time a user clicks a button - because then I can easilly forgett to add that function for a button. So some kind of automatic logging based on user action would be sweet :)

I'm building my application in PHP using Wordpress as Framework.

Answer 1

First of all, wordpress is CMS, not framework.

Second, when user does an action that you want to log, just call a function you created for that purpose, which saves action to txt/xml/database. A few call are needed, not plenty.

Answer 2

The number of times you make the call shouldn't be that many (and you should be familiar enough with your own codebase) that you should be able to make a simple function like log($user,'action','related') which stores that data either in plain text or in a similarly defined database table.