By Jeffro on July 6, 2012
It looks like after three years since the discussion took place on the WPTavern forums regarding the standardization of theme hooks, Doug Stewart has decided to put together a Theme Hook Alliance project to get theme authors all on the same page.
Child theme authors and plugin developers need a consistent set of entry points to allow for easy customization and altering of functionality. Core WordPress offers a suite of [action hooks](http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/) and [template tags](http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_tags) but does not cover many of the common use cases. The Theme Hook Alliance is a community-driven effort to agree on a set of third-party action hooks that THA themes pledge to implement in order to give that desired consistency.
It will be interesting to see how far this goes and what the adoption rate will be like. Doug is looking for some feedback so if you’re keen to the idea, let him know in the comments of his blog post.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged hooks, standards, Themes |
By Jeffro on October 27, 2010
This post is an FYI to plugin developers. According to Scribu who posted on the WordPress development update blog, If you were using register_activation_hook() to also handle updates from older versions of your plugins, you will not be able to do so any more in WP 3.1: [16012]The activation hook is now fired only when the user activates the plugin and not when an automatic plugin update occurs. This is consistent with how the deactivation hook works.. There is a proposal for a register_update_hook instead within ticket 14912.
All plugin authors should read the post and the associated tickets to make sure your plugin will check for updates properly after WordPress 3.1 is released.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged developers, hooks, Plugins, updates |
By Jeffro on August 7, 2010
Need help finding the right hook within WordPress? Thanks to PressCoders.com, the job of finding that hook just became much easier with a newly developed resource called WordPress Hook Explorer or WHeX. WHeX is an application built on top of Silverlight 4.0 which means you’ll need to have the Silverlight extension installed within your browser to take advantage of the site. With WHeX, you can browse in real-time all of the hooks within WordPress 3.0. For example, if you’re looking for all hooks dealing with comments, simply type in the word comments into the search box and you’re presented with results that show the hooktype, filename where the hook is located, line number, where at in the directory tree the hook is located, hook full text, hook description, usage, and hook ID. The application also has an index for WordPress 2.9.2 but does not go back any farther.
In the future, PressCoders plans to create an out of browser version of WHeX so that users won’t need to have a browser connected to the web to use it. To see WHeX in action, check out the following video.
DGwyer who is one of the creators of WHeX is open to feedback and requests which you can give via the following forum thread.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged application, developers, hooks, silverlight, wordpress |
By Jeffro on May 21, 2009
Community member Dan Cole started a conversation the other day asking if it was time that theme authors got together to standardize the names of theme hooks.
More and more themes are putting hooks in their themes, but when they do this they use their own naming convention. Theme developers and WordPress.org should pack together and create a standard naming convention for the most common ones. It would do a big favor to the people who use these hooks and even move it away from just personal use, plugin developers could then start to take advantage of these hooks in themes.
There has already been some feedback published in the forum where as the idea looks like it has merit. As for my thoughts on the matter, I’m not a theme developer and I’m still not at the level of understanding this lingo people use such as hooks, filters, blabla. But thinking about it the other day, I want to know what these terms mean so I can follow the conversations that take place surrounding subjects like these. I’ll be tapping into WordPress For Dummies as I believe their is a section that covers this material.
Last but not least, Dan has published a survey to try and get a better idea as to where people stand on the issue.
This thread in the forum as well as the one for theme standards has given me an idea for a post I’ve been thinking about for awhile now. Time to get cracking!
Posted in From The Forum | Tagged hooks, names, standards, Themes