One of the ways that WordPress plugins come to be is that, at least in my case, they start off as a collection of functions used to help with a particular purpose for a given project. From there, you think “Hey, maybe someone else will find this useful.”

At least that’s been my experience more often than not.

But the thing is that before you release it for other people to try, you want to go through the process of cleaning up the code. I’m not talking about refactoring WordPress plugins, either – at least not yet.

I’m talking about taking the code, bringing it up to something that will work as a WordPress plugin, and then possibly refactoring the code.

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This past weekend, I spent time closing a bunch of sites, exporting content from one service to another, preparing to consolidate a couple of sites, and even shutting some sites down.

But the number one thing that has resulted in a weird bit of feedback is the idea that I opted to archive my data from Medium in preparing to move it to a WordPress-based site. This resulted in some weird WordPress versus Medium points from others.

Truthfully, I know this kind of argument will never die. But I digress for now.

And, I suppose, the reason this is weird is that I – like many who use WordPress – want the control that comes with owning your data. Perhaps it’s also about playing in someone else’s sandbox, too, right?

But there’s an inherent problem with sticking only with one CMS and neglecting what the rest of the industry is doing.

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Updating options within the WordPress admin is simple, right? It’s a matter of filling out a text field, checking a box, or swapping a radio button then clicking save.

But let’s say that you need to set up a hook that fires that also updates a secondary, related option whenever one is toggled.

For example, given an option represented by a checkbox, let’s say that you want to set an option in the database whenever the checkbox is unchecked and then delete it whenever said option is set.

There’s an action specifically for doing this that makes it pretty easy.

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