Stop Chasing Bugs: A Better WordPress Event Management System

Had a client come to us with a site that was a total mess. It had years of custom code from different developers, and things were breaking in weird ways. The main issue was with user profile updates. Sometimes data would save, sometimes it wouldn’t. After a bit of digging, I found the culprit: a dozen different functions hooked into `profile_update`, all firing in an unpredictable order. It was a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen, leading to a complete breakdown in their WordPress event management.

My first thought was to just jump in and start messing with hook priorities. A quick fix, right? I bumped one function’s priority to 9, another to 20, hoping to force them into a logical sequence. And it worked… for about five minutes. Then we discovered another bug where user roles were being assigned incorrectly because a different hook, one I hadn’t even seen, was now firing at the wrong time. I was playing whack-a-mole. Total nightmare.

Decoupling Your Classes from the Plugin API

The real problem wasn’t the hook priorities. It was the architecture. Every class was responsible for its own `add_action` or `add_filter` calls, usually right in the constructor. This tightly couples your application logic to the WordPress API. Your class shouldn’t have to know the details of how it’s being hooked into the system. It should only be responsible for its own job. This is a pattern I’ve refined over the years, partly inspired by concepts from frameworks like Symfony, and great posts like the one from Carl Alexander on this exact topic.

The solution is to create a central event manager. A single point of contact between your code and the WordPress plugin API. Instead of classes adding their own hooks, they simply “subscribe” to events they care about. The manager handles the rest.

// A simple interface for our subscribers
interface SubscriberInterface {
    public static function get_subscribed_hooks();
}

// Example Subscriber Class
class UserProfileLogger implements SubscriberInterface {
    public static function get_subscribed_hooks() {
        return [
            'profile_update' => ['log_profile_update', 10, 2],
        ];
    }

    public function log_profile_update($user_id, $old_user_data) {
        // ... do some logging magic here
    }
}

// The EventManager would then read this and register the hook.
// $manager->add_subscriber(new UserProfileLogger());

See the difference? The `UserProfileLogger` class doesn’t call `add_action`. It just declares what it wants to listen to. Clean. Now the Event Manager can handle the registration, and we can even add system-wide logic there if we need to. Trust me on this, it makes your code infinitely easier to debug and maintain.

So, What’s the Point?

The point is to stop thinking in terms of individual hooks and start designing a system. When you decouple your classes from the WordPress core, you gain a few huge advantages:

• Testability: Your classes are now just plain PHP objects. You can test their logic without having to load all of WordPress.
• Maintainability: Need to find every function that hooks into `profile_update`? It’s all managed in one place. No more hunting through dozens of files.
• Clarity: Your classes do their job. The Event Manager does its job. Simple as that.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.