Developers must be aware of both WordPress actions and filters when working with WordPress professionally; in other words, they must be mindful of WordPress hooks. Hooks are what enable us to modify, enhance, and extend WordPress through an API in our themes, plugins, and WordPress development.

Hooks WordPress, actions, and filters are powerful tools for creating custom functionality in your WordPress website. They provide developers with a layer of abstraction that gives them the flexibility to build customized solutions for their clients.

WordPress is a popular platform that allows you to create custom functionality without worrying about repetitive code, clunky programming logic, or other backend coding headaches. These tools also allow developers to control how they interact with their new WordPress site and where they might take them next. This article will explain WordPress Hooks, Actions, and Filters and how they work together to help you build robust WordPress solutions.

WordPress Hooks: what are they, and how do they work?

A WordPress hooks order is a function you can create in your theme or WordPress plugin. It Hooks files to run before, after, or instead of a WordPress action. They are designed for two main reasons:

When certain conditions are met in posting articles, pages, and custom content onto your site, carry out a task. To control how specific calls and interactions with your site’s code work within the core code of WordPress.

Hooks operate on conditions that must be met before executing via WordPress themes or their related actions. Requirements can vary in how they’re implemented, and much like actions, they differ in terms of what they could potentially be used for.

Developers can attach functions to the WordPress hooks list by calling them events with names like save the post. Your part is attached to (or hooked up to!) the name as a reference. The hook’s added functions are executed when it is run at a specific point in the WordPress load process.

How do hooks work?

It can be challenging to understand how hooks operate at first, so we’ll break down what occurs when a WordPress hook is activated (executing the functions to perform actions and applying filters appears to be what developers refer to as) into simple steps to try and help.

Step 1: WordPress hooks the action or filter function.

Step 2: The hooked action or filter is executed, and the WordPress hooks that were run will immediately return the value true. This lets WordPress know everything is OK and should continue to the next step (i.e., proceed to the next hook in the system).

Step 3: Depending on the filter or action used, this answer may be some updated data for WordPress, or it may be a simple truth to declare that it was finished successfully. The action or filter function then executes whatever code it contains.

Step 4:  WordPress hooks present during the function’s execution now run again. This is why this process continues at regular intervals: each time it returns true, WordPress also runs the next step to check if any more hooks need to be run. If there are none, it will proceed with processing at its usual rate.

Step 5:  The first hook called in this example has returned true, meaning WordPress should run all the remaining themes (there are two in this example). This means they’ll all run and go through their respective steps until they reach a final state — which is a return value of false (in our case, “I’m done!”).

Key points to remember about WordPress hooks

• WordPress hooks are a crucial WordPress feature that lets developers add custom code at specific points during the PHP processing of WordPress.
• These customized PHP functions, called hooked functions, are written by developers. Actions and filters are two different categories of hooked functions.
• Action hooks and filter hooks are the two different types of hooks. Filter hooks and action hooks both “hook in” filters and actions, respectively.
• Utilizing their filter hooks, filters receive code or markup; they modify it, and then they
• Must return the modified content so WordPress can use it in its regular processing.
• In contrast, actions are not required to return a value, and their action hooks frequently do not pass specific parameters to the action.

What are the different types of hooks?

In WordPress, there are two different kinds of hooks: actions and filters. Although they act somewhat differently despite being very similar, it is essential to note the difference. Let’s examine each in turn.

Action hooks

Action hooks, named after how they function, let you add code to the action of a plugin. They allow you to add custom code before and after a “hook,” or event, the specific part of WordPress that your actions and filters are attached to.

Actions are known as plugins because they extend WordPress’s core functionality by letting you create custom post types (add-ons), pages, admin user roles, and other WordPress plugin Hooks functions without changing the core of WordPress.

This lets WordPress know that a WordPress plugin or theme developer has added an action hook. Into core WordPress files, and they run code executed every time the hook is triggered. A developer can access any functions directly by using the hooks name, with no parameters.

Filter hooks

Filter hooks are different: they filter hooked functions, meaning they change the code being executed by hooks. They can be used similarly to actions, except that filter hooks are only added to core WordPress files and do not function during post-back processing.

Filter hooks are for filtering (or modifying) all kinds of data related to modifications of content on your site and customizing your WordPress website’s UI. Examples of filter hooks include adding and removing support for post formats, modifying widget output, and many more.

Themes and plugins use filters to modify content, customize fields, or change data. The content is entered on the front end of your website, and the filter hooks are added before the content is rendered so they can manipulate the data before it reaches your user’s web browser.

The difference between ‘action’ and ‘filter’ in WordPress

WordPress Actions

Actions are WordPress hooks that let you add functions directly to the execution of WordPress events. Alone, they only trigger after a specific event, such as an update to the post_content or the saving of a post. However, they can be used in tandem with filters to accomplish some pretty cool things.

Actions can be used in themes and plugins to perform tasks like creating custom post types, pages, and taxonomies (like tags and categories), or any other kind of custom feature built as a plugin that adds functionality to a WordPress site.

WordPress Filters

Liquid Filters differ from Actions because they run based on specific “filters.” They can be used to modify existing WordPress functions or replace them with entirely new parts.

Filters are used to modify content entered into your website’s front-end; it may be information and data from a WordPress post or field data from a user form. In any case, the filter hooks function before the information is rendered so they can manipulate the data before it reaches your user’s browser.

Conclusion

This article taught us what WordPress hooks are and how they work. We also looked at two of the most basic and commonly used actions (the “action hook” and the “filter hooks”), along with two of the most basic and widely used filters (the “String” filter and the “Number” filter).

The best way to learn more about hooks is to make your own! Create a few custom hooks for your theme or plugin to practice this technique. Consider the functionality required for your project related to WordPress maintenance, and then write the necessary code for each hook.