A lot of people have written about how competitive WordPress has become and how difficult it is to make money with WordPress from products such as themes and plugins. Others believe there’s still plenty to be thankful for in WordPress.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks.

Editor’s note: Today we’re delighted to invite back one of WPShout’s dearest friends: Josh Pollock!

If you’ve ever wanted to offer a WordPress plugin on the open market, you’ll know a lot of questions come right up. “How?” and “Is my code good enough?” and “Will I immediately drown in support tickets?” are just three.

Making a widget to show a random post uses two underlying concepts you need to get familiar with to be good at WordPress development: making use of WP_Query objects, and making widgets. If you’ve not checked them before, check out our Quick Guides which more thoroughly introduce both:

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.

As a complement to our last Quick Guide, this week we’re going to offer an example of what it’s like to use your first action hook in WordPress. In this case, we’ll use the wp_footer action to add some markup to our WordPress footer. As the video details, you’ll probably want to do this for very basic HTML in the theme most times, but this way works with absolutely any theme you might run. Speaking of the video, if watching is your preference: