When exactly woocommerce/wordpress hooks are called?

Question

I know there are hundreds of action hooks available in Wordpress and in Woocommerce plugin, but what is most confusing to me is: when exactly they are invoked?

For some of the hooks there are some information available in the internet, but for many of them I do not see any information available.

For example when I was checking the code of some custom plugin, I see following hooks:

add_action( 'admin_enqueue_scripts', array( $this, 'enqueue_scripts' ) );
add_action( 'woocommerce_settings_api_form_fields_cod', array( $this, 'extend_cod' ) );
add_action( 'woocommerce_settings_api_sanitized_fields_cod', array( $this, 'clean_up_settings' ) );
add_action( 'woocommerce_delete_shipping_zone', array( $this, 'clean_up_gateway' ) );

My questions are where I can get the list of all the hooks for Woocommerce/Wordpress? In the above example whether hooks starting with 'woocommerce_' are part of standard hooks or they are custom hooks specific to plugin? Is it possible to create custom hooks?

Answer 1

There are 2 kinds of hooks : Action hooks and filter hooks.

Hooks are added/created via do_action() or apply_filters() functions.

Hooks are triggered when the code where that do_action() or apply_filters() are located run.

You can attach a callback function to an existing hook usingadd_action() oradd_filter() .

• Wordpress hooks: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/hooks/
• Woocommerce hooks: https://docs.woocommerce.com/wc-apidocs/hook-docs.html
• All plugins and themes have their own hooks.
• So YES you can create your own custom hooks.

Note: There is also a lot of undocumented hooks like most of various composite hooks.

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Related:

• WooCommerce action hooks and overriding templates
• How to add custom hooks to a custom plugin for Woocommerce
• Hooks and their hooked functions execution queue in Wordpress and Woocommerce