Adam R Brown

What is a hook?

In brief, WordPress hooks enable you to change how WordPress behaves without editing any core files. Because you leave the WordPress files untouched, you can painlessly upgrade your blog with each new version of WordPress. It's this hooks architecture that makes WordPress the best blogging solution.

If you don't know what WordPress hooks are for, read the Plugin API or this tutorial. If you're new to web design, you might also enjoy my easy PHP tutorial.

What is this directory?

If you're a plugin or theme developer, you know how difficult it can be to figure out which hooks are available. To assist website developers, this WordPress hooks database automatically scans each WP build for apply_filters(), apply_filters_ref_array(), do_action(), and do_action_ref_array to figure out exactly which hooks are available in each WordPress version and where the hooks occur.

What is this good for?

• See what new hooks are available with each new version of WordPress
• See which hooks have been deprecated or renamed (use the "view all hooks" option)
• Easily learn exactly which WP file(s) use each hook. That way, if the hook is poorly documented, you can just look in the source and figure out what it does.
• For 553 of the most-used hooks, you can read a brief description of the hook. These are scraped from the official WordPress documentation's action reference and filter reference.

How to help?

Update and improve the official action and filter references. Next time we scrape those, your contributions will show up here. (And preserve the formatting of those references so that my code can parse them.)