{"id":6460,"date":"2019-10-15T16:13:39","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T10:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/codeforgeek.com\/?p=6460"},"modified":"2023-12-22T19:05:41","modified_gmt":"2023-12-22T13:35:41","slug":"wordpress-publish-post-hook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codeforgeek.com\/wordpress-publish-post-hook\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Publish Post Hook"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I have mentioned in our technology stack article, we use WordPress to manage our content. Our front-end is handled and served using Node and MongoDB stack and I needed to connect these two systems (WordPress and custom Node stack) without making any large dependencies. <\/p>\n

One of the old school ways is to create a job scheduler<\/strong> which looks for changes in the WordPress periodically and create\/update content in local MongoDB.<\/p>\n

I don’t like this approach at all. Instead, I was looking for something event-based i.e when we publish a new article or update the article, WordPress generates an event and allows us to write our business logic after the event.<\/p>\n

I found WordPress publish hooks<\/strong> to be the solution.<\/p>\n

Here is my live WordPress publish hook. This code should be placed in the functions.php<\/strong>.<\/p>\n


\n\/\/ add action
\nadd_action( 'post_updated', 'post_update_function', 10, 3 );<\/p>\n

function post_update_function( $post_ID, $post_after, $post_before ) {
\n\t\/\/ on each change, call this api to notify the content engine
\n\t$event = null;
\n\t\/\/ if article is auto draft
\n\tif($post_before -> post_status === 'auto-draft' && $post_after -> post_status === 'publish') {
\n\t\t$event = 'new_article';
\n\t\/\/ if article is draft then published
\n\t} else if($post_before -> post_status === 'draft' && $post_after -> post_status === 'publish') {
\n\t\t$event = 'new_article';
\n\t\/\/ if its updated article
\n\t} else if($post_before -> post_status === 'publish' && $post_after -> post_status === 'publish') {
\n\t\t$event = 'updated_article';
\n\t} else {
\n\t\treturn;
\n\t}
\n\tif($event === null) {
\n\t\treturn;
\n\t}
\n\t$response = wp_remote_post('----custom API end point ------', array(
\n\t\t'method' => 'POST',
\n\t\t'body' => array('eventType' => $event, 'postId' => $post_ID )
\n\t));
\n}
\n<\/code><\/p>\n

As you can see in the code shown above, whenever we create or update a post, a new event will be triggered that will in turn call post_update_function<\/strong> function.<\/p>\n

You can write any custom business logic inside the function. I wrote a code that calls the API exposed by the Node server. <\/p>\n

I have also wrapped this in a nice and clean WordPress plugin. Click here<\/a> to visit the repository.<\/p>\n

Further study<\/h3>\n