How to write your own WordPress code snippet - Clear WPRocket cache when saving a page

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to write you own WordPress Code snippet from scratch from some basic building blocks.


Writing a code snippet gives you flexibility in achieving a lot of new stuff in WordPress. You are not limited to using plugins or using snippets somebody else wrote. 

This blog post will show you how to write a WordPress code snippet and see what building blocks to use when writing custom code.

The building blocks you can use are actions, filters, and conditional tags. These building blocks allow you to change how WordPress works or hook into plugins code and add your custom functionality.

WordPress Actions

WordPress actions are calls that WordPress makes at specific points in the page rendering lifecycle. WordPress has a lot of predefined actions that you can hook into and add your custom functionality. In addition, most plugins also register custom actions that allow you to hook into the respective plugins' code. 

An example of a WordPress action is wp_head. WordPress calls this action when it's going to render the header of a page. Anyone interested can subscribe to this action and register the custom code that WordPress will trigger before rendering the title. You can subscribe to this action in a theme, or plugin, or in a Code Snippet.

WordPress Filters

WordPress filters are like actions, but they are used to filter a value. For example, a WordPress filter is the_title. This filter tells all interested code that the title is ready to display. If you subscribe to this filter, you can programmatically change the title.

The difference between this and a WordPress action is that the filter should return an updated value (it filters it) that WordPress will use in the following steps. Actions won't return anything to WordPress and can output content (e.g., using echo).

For example, the following code would uppercase all words in the title:

<?php
add_filter('the_title', function($title) {
    $new_title = ucwords($title);
    return $new_title;
});

The function we attach to this filter takes the title, modifies it, and returns the updated value.

WordPress Functions

WordPress provides several functions that you can use in your code snippets. For example, you can use these functions to ask questions about the current context (conditional tags). Or you can call these functions to instruct WordPress or other plugins to perform a specific action.

Conditional tags are functions that you can use to ask WordPress about the current context. For example, a conditional tag is is_page(). You can use this to perform certain actions based on the current context. For example, if you want to add a code snippet to a WordPress page, you could wrap that code in an if statement.

<?php
if(is_page()) {
    // Your code goes here
}

Global functions are functions that WordPress or other plugins expose. These functions perform an action. For example, if you call rocket_clean_domain(); it will clear the WPRocket cache.

Writing a custom WordPress code snippet

By combining these simple building blocks, you can build almost anything you will ever need to do with WordPress. It might even be possible to connect your espresso machine to the WordPress dashboard, so you can make a coffee by pressing a button in wp-admin 🙂

Let's put it all together.

The snippet we are going to build today will clear the wp rocket cache when saving a page in the admin dashboard.

First, we will need to look for an action triggered when we save a page in WordPress. We can look for WordPress action in the developer reference or on google.

Tip: WPCodeBox will auto-suggest all WordPress actions when you type add_action('');

After looking at the WordPress documentation, we can see a save_post action that gets triggered when we save a post. Of course, a page is still a post, and WordPress will also call this action when saving pages. 

Now our snippet looks like this:

<?php
add_action('save_post', function($post_id, $post_object){
    // Our code goes here
});

This code tells WordPress: Hey, we have some code that needs to run when someone saves a post. So here is the code I want you to run every time that happens.

The next thing we want to do is check if the post that the user is saving is a page. WordPress will send us the post id and the post data when triggering the action. We can use that to check that the saved post is a page.

Our code snippet becomes:

<?php
add_action('save_post', function( $post_id, $post_object ){
    if(is_page($post_id)) {
        // Our code goes here
    }
});

Now, our code will only run if the current post type is a page. So if the post type is post, or product, or anything else, nothing will happen.

If the post the user saves is a page, we want to clear the WPRocket cache. WPRocket exposes the function rocket_clean_domain(); that cleans the WP Rocket cache for this domain.

All we need to do now is call this function in our snippet. The code snippet becomes:

<?php
add_action('save_post', function($post_id, $post_object){
    if($post->post_type === 'page') {
        rocket_clean_domain();
    }
});

Congratulations! You have successfully written your first WordPress code snippet. 

As you can see, with just a few lines of code and publicly available information, we managed to add our custom functionality to WordPress.

Understanding these basic building blocks will give you unlimited flexibility when working with WordPress. In addition, you can easily find all the information you need to build your custom WordPress code snippets online.

And if you want to write quickly, test, and manage WordPress code snippets, give WPCodeBox a try. It provides you with code suggestions. It autocompletes WordPress actions and filters. And it allows you to save all your code snippets to the cloud, so you can keep them organized, and you can share them across all your WordPress sites.

Get WPCodeBox, the most powerful WordPress Code Snippet Manager.

and save hours when customizing WordPress sites.

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