PHP Hooks System

Jumaat, 2 September 2011, 11:19 am0

After reading Explaining Hooks, finally I understand the concept of hooks in PHP and why people use it in WordPress and say WP codes is poetry.

The general idea is, in a web application, during the runtime of the program it go through stages of processes, such as connecting to database, start the session, rendering template etc. These are known as events. When these events occured during the runtime of the program, some external code can be run as additional processing to the core program. These external/additional process is known as plugin.

So, the hooks system expose these events for the plugins to attach to. So that when the event occur, the plugin will be run. Even though the concept seems simple, but there are problem that we need to handle:

Which plugin to call first when this event occur? The hooks system need to have priority feature to make sure plugins are called in correct order, to produce the intended result

What plugin need to load? If load all, wouldn’t it affect the site performance? This is why plugins need to be registered to the plugins system of an application. So that, the core application know what plugins to load at what time, and what function to run.

Therefore, the hooks system need to have plugin registration section, priority section, specify the list of hooks event available and know how to handle unknown events. The plugin data can be stored in database, and stored the configuration data temporarily in cache for faster access.