Using WordPress hooks is one of those topics that you hang around any Slack channel forum, email thread, Twitter conversation, or whatever and you’ll find that understanding them and using them correctly is key to working with the application.

But if there’s one thing that I get obsessive about, is using the right hook (as opposed to the left hook 🙃).

Sure, that reads weird, but look at it this way:

• each hook offers a variety of parts of the application available at a given time,
• and each hook is given a specific name.

So it would stand to reason that we try to hook our functions into the hook that’s most closely aligned and appropriately named for our particular requirement, right?

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WordPress Ajax responses are things that I’ve written about several times in the past (and it’s because I do a lot of work with Ajax in WordPress and because I often see other code that uses it in a variety of ways).

Implementing a call to the server from the client-side.

Of course, I’m not trying to set a definitive way to using WordPress, Ajax, JSON, and so on; otherwise, I wouldn’t spend my time writing posts about it, but there are things that I think are important to cover if for no other reason than to serve as reminders both to myself and those reading.

In the last year, I’ve written:

1. Ajax in WordPress: A Strategy For Error Codes
2. Writing a Custom Protocol for Ajax Responses
3. An Example of the Ajax API

And sure, some of the above posts are a bit out of date. All the more reason to write updated content, right?

Since I recently finished a series on implementing custom protocols, I thought it important to also remember that there are already ways to send WordPress Ajax responses if you’re looking for something a bit simpler.

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Pragmatic development in WordPress is not a phrase or a term that I’ve found, read, or that exists (to my knowledge) outside this particular post. The idea has come from two sources:

1. The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt,
2. And a couple of projects that I’ve been working on recently.

I want to use the standard definition of “pragmatic” before I get into the rest of this post:

dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

With that said, I think there are a few things we can learn from this as it relates to applying pragmatic development in WordPress projects.

Of course, this raises the question of what type of situations calls for this?

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