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.

This is a cool article from Igor Benic about making your code more extensible. For one-off work, extensibility doesn’t really matter. But if you have a commercial plugin, it’s really nearly required in the WordPress ecosystem. The idea that really struck me was the first: letting people override a plugin’s front-end style with add_theme_support. What a cool idea! I don’t know if I’ve just been missing out, or that there isn’t a lot of support for this idea in the wild, but this was totally novel to me.

This course covers one of WordPress’s most crucial and widely used systems: Hooks, including both actions and filters. We introduce Hooks as an event-driven system, present the key concepts and terminology you need to understand this system, and dig deep into how to use hooks in your own code—including hooking in your own functions, removing previously hooked functions, and creating your own action and filter hooks for others to use.

Today’s article continues our discussion of WordPress’s Hooks system with a practical look at the direct opposite of add_action() and add_filter(): remove_action() and remove_filter().

How does a single plugin become the basis of a thriving technology ecosystem? Partly by leveraging the extensibility that WordPress’s event-driven Hooks system makes possible.

I have a confession to make: for a long time I’ve been scared of Genesis.