MHM Rentiva v4.26.5: Vendor Dashboard Identity Card and Messaging Parity Fixes

v4.26.5 delivers the results of an extended UX polish session on the vendor dashboard: a premium identity card (Gravatar + last login) at the bottom of the left menu, a fix for vendor bookings not appearing in the messaging form, a premium redesign of message list cards, and a set of silent bug fixes alongside.

Written before 6.0.0

This post is the record of a release that shipped before 6.0.0, which renamed the plugin's post types, taxonomies, options, meta keys and hooks. The identifiers below are the names those versions actually used, and they are kept that way on purpose. For the current names — and a conversion table — see the 6.0.7 release post.

👤 Vendor Dashboard Identity Card

The vendor dashboard's left menu previously showed only the username and a "Log Out" link. Now it includes:

• Gravatar photo (40 px, rounded, white border, soft shadow)
• User display name (overflow controlled with ellipsis)
• Last successful login date and time (e.g. Last login: 15/04/2026 04:57)
• Log Out button moved outside the card as a standalone action; turns red on hover.

<?php
$last_login_raw = (string) get_user_meta($user->ID, 'last_login', true);
if ($last_login_raw !== '') {
    $ts = strtotime($last_login_raw);
    if ($ts) {
        echo date_i18n(get_option('date_format') . ' H:i', $ts);
    }
}
?>

last_login user meta — a key read but never written

An interesting discovery: the last_login user meta was already being read in our GDPR/Privacy and DataRetentionManager code — but was never written anywhere. This meant "this user hasn't logged in for N days" decisions in data retention calculations were always based on an empty value.

v4.26.5 closes this gap: SessionManager::set_session_timeout() now accepts the second parameter of the wp_login action (WP_User $user) and updates last_login with current_time('mysql').

add_action('wp_login', array(self::class, 'set_session_timeout'), 10, 2);

public static function set_session_timeout($user_login = '', $user = null): void
{
    $user_id = ($user instanceof \WP_User) ? (int) $user->ID : get_current_user_id();
    if (! $user_id) return;
    update_user_meta($user_id, 'mhm_rentiva_last_activity', time());
    update_user_meta($user_id, 'last_login', current_time('mysql'));
}

📥 Messaging: Vendors Now See Their Own Bookings

The Related Booking dropdown in the "New Message" form always came up empty — from the vendor's perspective. The REST endpoint only queried the _mhm_customer_user_id meta, i.e. "bookings I made as a customer". Bookings made by others on the vendor's own vehicles were not visible.

The fix: the endpoint runs two queries, merges the results by ID, deduplicates them, and sorts by post_date DESC:

// Customer-side: the user who made the booking
$customer_query = new WP_Query([
    'post_type' => 'vehicle_booking',
    'meta_query' => [[
        'key' => '_mhm_customer_user_id',
        'value' => $user_id,
    ]],
]);

// Vendor-side: bookings on vehicles owned by this vendor
$vendor_vehicle_ids = get_posts([
    'post_type' => 'vehicle',
    'author'    => $user_id,
    'posts_per_page' => -1,
    'fields'    => 'ids',
]);
if (!empty($vendor_vehicle_ids)) {
    $vendor_query = new WP_Query([
        'post_type' => 'vehicle_booking',
        'meta_query' => [[
            'key' => '_mhm_vehicle_id',
            'value' => $vendor_vehicle_ids,
            'compare' => 'IN',
        ]],
    ]);
}

🎨 Premium Message List Cards

Message list cards have moved from plain white boxes to a premium design:

• Gradient background (#ffffff → #fafbff)
• Purple pill ID badge (#4F46E5 background, #eef2ff fill)
• Orange gradient "NEW" label (#f59e0b → #f97316, box-shadow amber glow)
• On hover, an indigo accent bar appears on the card's left edge and the card lifts 2 px
• Unread state uses an amber background + left accent bar
• Mobile breakpoint: padding and typography adapt automatically

🗂️ .hidden — A Rule We Didn't Know Was Missing

The messages page template has three views:

1. Message list
2. Conversation (thread) view
3. New message form

The template tried to hide all three with class="hidden" initially — but the .hidden CSS rule was defined nowhere. As a result, all three rendered as display: block simultaneously. When the user scrolled down, they saw a confusing stack of overlapping panels.

The fix is a CSS utility:

.mhm-messages-section .hidden,
.mhm-messages-section .thread-reply.hidden,
.mhm-messages-section .new-message-form.hidden,
.mhm-messages-section .message-thread.hidden {
    display: none !important;
}

Now the three views are mutually exclusive: whichever is active is shown; the others are hidden.

🔁 No More Button Accumulation When Reopening a Thread

When a thread was closed and reopened, the "Close Message" button and "This conversation is closed" notice banner were appended to the DOM again without removing the stale elements first. The result: opening the same thread twice showed two "Close Message" buttons.

// Remove stale elements before re-rendering
$('#message-thread .close-thread-btn').remove();
$('#message-thread .thread-closed-notice').remove();

🔣 Mojibake Box and Translation Fixes

• The back-arrow (←) before the "Back to Messages" text in templates/account/messages.php was double-encoded UTF-8 (rendered as â†) and a stray C1 control byte (0xC2 0x90) remained in the template. Fix: <span aria-hidden="true">&larr;</span> HTML entity + PowerShell script to strip the C1 byte.
• In the Turkish .po file, the "Booking Association" label was translated as "Rezervasyon Derneği" (Booking Society) 😄 — corrected to "İlgili Rezervasyon".

📦 Filemtime Cache Busting

During this session we hit the "browser cache keeps serving old CSS/JS" loop twice. To prevent this going forward, asset enqueues now use filemtime versioning:

$customer_messages_css_ver = file_exists($path)
    ? MHM_RENTIVA_VERSION . '.' . filemtime($path)
    : MHM_RENTIVA_VERSION;
wp_enqueue_style('mhm-customer-messages', $url, [], $customer_messages_css_ver);

Even when the plugin version stays the same, every file change produces a unique query string like ?ver=4.26.5.1744742822 — the browser never serves the old file.

✅ Tests

720 tests, 2601 assertions, 6 skipped — fully green. No regressions.

Download

• GitHub Release v4.26.5 v4.26.5
• ZIP asset: mhm-rentiva.4.26.5.zip (2.61 MB, 764 files)

The next minor version (v4.27.0) is dedicated to the vendor report and dispute system — a unified infrastructure for booking, penalty, and vehicle reports.