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.

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 article will take you by the hand and lead you to become a WordPress plugin developer. We’ll analyze when the circumstances call for writing a plugin, where to place your plugin code and some best practices, and give you a taste of a few WordPress concepts regarding plugin development while coding a simple plugin.

Want to know how to include a JavaScript file onto your WordPress site? In this Quick Quide we use an awesome WordPress function called wp_enqueue_script() that is the correct way to include JavaScript files in WordPress. Whether your JavaScript files are for Vue, React, JQuery, or something else, this is how you include JavaScript files in WordPress pages.

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.

You’ve maybe noted that we’ve recently been writing about WordPress and object-oriented programming in PHP a lot. Just last week, Fred published an article about PHP magic methods, especially __construct, and how they work. This week I want to tackle a very common and oft-debated question about WordPress and OOP: when I use WordPress hooks, where do they go on my objects?

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.