How to clean up data when plugin uninstallation?
Share
How to clean up data when plugin uninstallation?
The first thing you can learn HTML, whether you want to become a professional web developer or just want to learn more about how websites work. The basic language for developing web pages and web applications is HTML. A server ...
Asynchronous Javascript One of AJAX’s benefits is it provides instantaneous feedback to the user because it requests information asynchronously from the backend web server. However, using AJAX does not guarantee the user will not wait for the asynchronous JavaScript and ...
How To Make Cookie Free Domain An HTTP cookie (also known as a web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the ...
Many plugins are guilty of leaving a lot of unnecessary data lying around. Data that only your plugin uses (such as meta data for posts or comments, database tables, etc.) can wind up as dead weight if the plugin doesn’t clean up after itself.
WordPress offers three great hooks to help you take care of this:
register_activation_hook()
This hook allows you to create a function that runs when your plugin is activated. It takes the path to your main plugin file as the first argument, and the function that you want to run as the second argument. You can use this to check the version of your plugin, do some upgrades between versions, check for the correct PHP version and so on.
register_deactivation_hook()
The name says it all. This function works like its counterpart above, but it runs whenever your plugin is deactivated. I suggest using the next function when deleting data; use this one just for general housekeeping.
register_uninstall_hook()
This function runs when the website administrator deletes your plugin in WordPress’ back end. This is a great way to remove data that has been lying around, such as database tables, settings and what not. A drawback to this method is that the plugin needs to be able to run for it to work; so, if your plugin cannot uninstall in this way, you can create an uninstall.php file. Check out this function’s documentation for more information.