This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks. Hooks are at the core not only of how WordPress plugins work, but nearly all code in the WordPress ecosystem: most WordPress themes use hooks heavily, as does “WordPress core” itself. WordPress hooks are absolutely a must-know topic in WordPress development.

About a month ago, I read a headline in the Post Status newsletter called “Let’s No-Code This Thing and All Go Home.” It linked to an article that stated:

This Quick Guide walks you through searching through all the files in a WordPress plugin using the Sublime Text code editor. This process works not only for searching through WordPress plugin folders, but for searching the contents of any folder using Sublime Text.

Today I want to dive into a kind of esoteric topic: WP option autoloading. It’s not something a lot of WordPress developers are likely to hit or to need. But vague knowledge of this topic saved me a bunch of time and confusion on a client project, so I want to help you understand how casual use of the update_option function without understanding WordPress’s autoload options feature can cause you pain and heartache.

This WordPress plugin development tutorial captures the steps I went through on a real project, including the mistakes I made and how I debugged them.

Sometimes, a developer will want to know why a WordPress site gets slow at a particular time, why their WP-Cron scheduled task isn’t working, or want to force one to run at off time. For all of these problems, the WP Crontrol plugin is the perfect tool. It’s a WordPress plugin to quickly debug your WP-Cron issues, all in one convenient place.

This video and text Quick Guide covers how to create a WordPress shortcode. If you want to learn the basics of WordPress shortcode creation, or if you want a refresher on shortcodes, you’re in the right place.

WordPress development is a hugely useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things out-of-order and try to tackle advanced topics while remaining confused on the fundamentals.

One of the most-used functions in my life with PHP is foreach. Partly, this is because it’s just an exquisitely named function, and it maps well to how I think. Partly this is because it’s kind of the backbone of a webpage: iterate through a set of things, operating on some selectively, and then display them all.

A few weeks ago we talked about what “cron jobs” were in WordPress and beyond. That tutorial about what “WordPress scheduled tasks” are hopefully gave you a good understanding of some of the things that you might do with them. Today we’ll instead focus on how you’ll use wp_schedule_event to actually do them. That is, we’ll cover a number of WordPress cron job examples.