Harness the Power of WordPress Hooks: Actions and Filters Explained
WordPress developers might be tempted to customize this famous website builder directly, but that approach creates ongoing maintenance headaches. Fortunately, a clean way to extend functionality is via WordPress hooks, actions, and filters.
Like any CMS, WordPress won’t always meet your every need right out of the box. Since it is open-source, you could hack it to make it conform to your business needs — but instead, you can use WordPress hooks to achieve your goals. Building with hooks is a winning strategy that frees WordPress developers to make just about any website feature imaginable.
WordPress Hooks: Actions and Filters
WordPress hooks are not just powerful customization tools, they are how WordPress components interact with one another. Hooked functions manage many of the routine tasks we consider to be part and parcel of WordPress, such as adding styles or scripts to a page, or surrounding footer text with HTML elements. A search of WordPress Core’s codebase reveals thousands of hooks in more than 700 locations. WordPress themes and plugins contain even more hooks.
Before we jump into hooks and explore the difference between action hooks and filter hooks, let’s understand where they fit within WordPress’ architecture.
WordPress Infrastructure
WordPress’ modular elements readily integrate with one another, so we can easily mix, match, and combine:
WordPress Core: These are the files required for WordPress to work. WordPress Core provides generalized architecture, the WP Admin dashboard, database queries, security, and more. WordPress Core is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.
Theme (or Parent Theme): A theme defines the basic layout and design of a website. Powered by PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, a theme functions by reading the WordPress MySQL database to generate the HTML code that renders in a browser. Hooks in a theme may add stylesheets, scripts, fonts, or custom post types, for example.
Child Theme: We create child themes ourselves to fine-tune the basic layout and design that parent themes provide. Child themes can define stylesheets and scripts to modify inherited features or add or remove post types. Child theme instructions always supersede those of the parent theme.
Plugin(s): To extend the back-end functionality of WordPress, we can choose from thousands of third-party plugins. Hooks in a plugin could, for example, notify us by email when a post is published or hide user-submitted comments that contain banned language.
Custom Plugin(s): When a third-party plugin does not fully meet business needs, we can turbocharge it by writing a custom plugin in PHP. Or we can write a new plugin from scratch. In both cases, we would add-hook(s) to extend existing functionality.
WordPress Infrastructure Hierarchy
Given that we have access to the source of all five layers, why are hooks needed in WordPress?
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