Hooks & Filters

WordPress child themes give a relatively easy way to customize the look and feel of a theme. If the theme’s options don’t provide you with adequate design choices, you can just add a new rule to the child theme’s default stylesheet file called style.css. But what happens when you also want to modify the theme’s functionality? That is one of the cases when WordPress actions come to your help. WordPress has become so popular partly because of its high customizability. The WordPress Core is loaded with different hooks that enable developers to modify or enhance the default functionality. Moreover, we are allowed to...

WordPress hooks are the thing to learn if you want to get into WordPress development. Hooks allows you to do two things: change default functionality within WordPress and add your own functionality without modifying core WordPress files at all. Making sure you never modify core files is extremely important, but modifying and adding stuff seems impossible without it. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can do it pretty easily with two types of hooks: actions and filters. You’ll need a basic understanding of HTML and PHP for this one, but not too much. Let’s dig in! The Need...

If you look at a WordPress page with any of the available developer tools, you might get the impression that it is mainly made up of HTML and CSS with some occasional JavaScript. However, what you see there is only the end product. In the background, much of any given WordPress page is actually constructed from PHP functions and database queries. These get interpreted by the browser who then spits out the page in a viewable form. While CSS works well to make superficial changes (colors, sizes, etc.), if you want to make bigger, structural alterations, you will need to deal...