Eric L. Ingram

WordPress Consultant

WordPress

What is a Hook?

By

Hooks, Actions and Filters

Hooks are provided by WordPress to allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; that is, to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion. There are two kinds of hooks:

  1. Actions: Actions are the hooks that the WordPress core launches at specific points during execution, or when specific events occur. Your plugin can specify that one or more of its PHP functions are executed at these points, using the Action API.
  2. Filters: Filters are the hooks that WordPress launches to modify text of various types before adding it to the database or sending it to the browser screen. Your plugin can specify that one or more of its PHP functions is executed to modify specific types of text at these times, using the Filter API.

You can sometimes accomplish the same goal with either an action or a filter. For example, if you want your plugin to change the text of a post, you might add an action function to publish_post (so the post is modified as it is saved to the database), or a filter function to the_content (so the post is modified as it is displayed in the browser screen). speed test website .

Recommended Plugins for WordPress

By

WordPress offers many plugins to extend the functionality to do almost anything.  There are currently over 16,000 plugins available in the Plugins Directory at WordPress.    Many of the plugins have the same function and features as others.  How you choose, begins with some of my recommended plugins in this article.

All-in-One SEO – If you want any chance of ranking in search engines this is a must have plugin.  All-in-One SEO pack allows you to add keywords, titles and meta descriptions to each page and blog post of your site.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

W3 Total Cache – This plugin makes a copy of your web page on the server and by doing so it increases site performance and reduces the resource consumption. It is essential that you have this plugin just incase if your site hits the Front Page of a social media network such as digg or stumbleupon, without this plugin, your server will most likely crash.

CformsII – CformsII offers lots of flexibility in there contact form solution.  The plugin provides SPAM protection, Ajax support, multi-recipients, and database tracking. 

Flickr Gallery – This gallery allows you to insert your flickr gallery in your web page/blog using shortcodes.  The installation is seamless and works great.