Adam R Brown

I updated the WordPress Hooks Database today. Now, it gives options to view deprecated hooks by version. It also keeps track of hook renamings, so that if a hook was renamed, it will tell you that rather than just claiming that the hook was deleted.

WP Hooks Directory

After announcing the WordPress hooks database last night, I went back and made several fixes and improvements.

The biggest improvement: When viewing information about a single hook, my site automatically scrapes the official WordPress codex (don’t worry automattic, it’s cached). If it finds an entry for that hook, it displays it right there above the hook’s version history.

Another big improvement: Not only do you get to see the codex’s documentation (if it exists for the hook), but my site will also generate a list of (possibly) related hooks. Don’t you hate it when you think you found the right hook, but it turns out to be not quite what you needed? Well, there you go–check out the related hooks.

With these two features, the database is now a fully featured, automatic alternative to the previous attempt to make a hooks database (over at flatearth.org ), which appears to have been abandoned.

I also squashed some bugs. There were a couple 404s in the database that shouldn’t have been there, and the feedback link was broken initially, and there were some minor HTML validation errors.

I’ve been getting lots of hits, and it looks folks are linking to it from the codex and from del.icio.us, but I have yet to hear much feedback. Don’t be a lurker, mate…

If you’re a plugin developer, you know how difficult it can be to figure out which hooks are available. This WordPress hooks database automatically scans each WP build for apply_filters() and do_action() to figure out exactly which hooks are available in each version.

WordPress hooks database

What is this good for?

• See what new hooks are available with each new version of WordPress
• See which hooks have been deprecated (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.

What is this not good for?

The goal is not to explain what each hook does, but rather to list which are available in each version. If you just want to know what a hook does, check out the official action reference and filter reference , as well as the information at flat earth .

That being said, you’ll notice that those sites fail to include all the hooks. When that’s the case, find the hook here. This site will tell you where in the WP source the hook is applied, making it easy for you to figure out what it does on your own.