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

Today’s article is on an advanced topic in WordPress development, and is by a distinguished guest and a truly outstanding WordPress developer and educator: Carl Alexander.

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.

WordPress’s hook system is an example of an “event driven” architecture or programming system.