When developing WordPress plugins, it is very common for developers to tie into some of WordPress’s core actions, allowing for a plugin’s custom functions to be run when the core action takes place.
I’m going to show you how to tie a custom function into the action that takes place when a post is published, which will allow us to execute our custom function every time the “publish” button is clicked.
Doing this can be extremely useful for a huge number of possible reasons:
- If you want to schedule something to happen when a post is published
- If you want to send out an email to your subscribers when posts are published
- If you want to limit post title lengths
- If you want to do anything related to the publication of a post
For the purpose of this post, I’m not going to write a function that does anything, but I am going to show you how to tie any function you want into the publish post action.
First, write your function that will perform some task or other:
1 2 3 4 5 | // function to be executed when a post is published function run_when_post_published() { // your function code here } |
Next is to tie the function into the publish_post action:
1 | add_action('publish_post', 'run_when_post_published'); |
Your function run_when_post_published will now be executed every time a post is published.
There’s a problem with the publish_post action though: it also runs whenever a post is updated. So, depending on what your function does, this may not be optimal. Luckily, WordPress also has actions that allow us to run our function only when a post is newly published:
1 2 3 | add_action('new_to_publish', 'run_when_post_published'); add_action('draft_to_publish', 'run_when_post_published'); add_action('pending_to_publish', 'run_when_post_published'); |
Now, your function will only run when:
- Your post is published (updated) for the first time
- Your post transitions from draft to published
- Your post transitions from pending to published
Note: the actions described above will not work for Custom Post Types. However there are similar action hooks for Custom Post Types I have detailed on my website.
Enjoy!
Pippin
Hi,
I tried that but nothing happens. when I'm using publish_post it works fine, but there is the issue when updating a post
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