One of the flexibility features of WordPress is the use of hooks. The work of the developer implies their thorough knowledge because hooks are used in the core, themes, plugins, and allow you to maintain compatibility with various versions of WordPress. If you want to insert any content anywhere in your project without manually editing template files, you can use hooks.
What do hooks look like in the theme? For example, wp_head is a hook. In general, their purpose is to “hook up” the necessary material to the basic functions. So, let’s say you have a theme with hooks in your code, and you can remove, disable, or enable the necessary hooks. It is easy to get acquainted with the detailed description of the functions of all hooks in more detail on the Internet, but let’s deal with the most elementary, namely, how to connect and create hooks yourself.
Peculiarities of Working with Hooks
It is worth noting that beginners will need to learn PHP to understand hooks’ work better. After all, to create a hook, you need to write a PHP function and complement it with the necessary functionality. Thus, the hook you created you will have to write yourself in the code of the theme files.
PHP functions are attached to hooks (filters or actions), then these functions will be triggered when the hook is triggered. For the filter to work, the add_filter function is used that adds PHP functions to the specified filter, as well as the apply_filters function where the filter is applied and runs the PHP functions attached to the filter.
So, hooks fall into two categories: actions and filters. With the action hook, we add the process, while the filter hook is used to change the process values. Filters are needed to filter the value, in other words, to receive the value and return it, and actions work at a certain moment and do not return anything.
Actions allow you to run a PHP function when the specified action is triggered, add or change the functionality of WordPress or a plugin. The function attached to the PHP hook will be triggered at a certain moment. At this moment, some tasks can be performed, for example, displaying something on the screen or writing data to a database, or whatever. For example, there is a wp_insert_comment hook that works when a comment is added. By attaching a function to such an action, we can notify the post author of comments.
Until you write your plugin, the hook code should be placed in the functions.php file. This file is located in the wp-content/themes/directory with the directory containing the current theme. For example, this way you can connect your custom function to the engine core function: <? Php add_action (‘publish_post’, ‘myCustomFunction’). To remove a hook, use the remove_action () function. The first parameter add_action () is the name of the hook to which the function specified in the second parameter will be attached.
Thus, with placed hooks, for example, in WordPress, you can perform actions without editing the main code and extending the functionality without causing harm.