What is the Event Management System?

What is the Event Management System within the Plugin API? It is the system that allows you and I, as developers, to extend, customize, and enhance the website and user experience (UX). It allows you to register your code to specific events and then get called for your code to do its thang.

WordPress provides us the ability to hook into Core, plugins, and the theme in order to run our code when some event occurs.

Think about that. WordPress Core loads and runs in a specific order. It allows the plugins and theme at different points in that sequence. Let’s say you need to run some code to change the main query that WordPress is going to process. You don’t go into WordPress Core and change the code there. No no no. Instead, you register a callback to the event name. Then WordPress fires that event and your callback runs.

Hooks are the means to hook into the web page building sequence. It lets you run your code too.

WordPress provides you with a registration system using add_action and add_filter. You are registering your function to say: “Hey, WordPress, run this code too when this event runs.” Your function’s name gets registered into a lookup table that is stored in wp_filter.

Before you dive into how to use the functions, first you need to understand why. Why do you need an event-driven system? What is it doing? When do you use it? Let’s talk about the big picture in this episode.