standards

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.

Standardizing Theme Hook Names

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!