Developer Hours: Exploring Block Hooks in WordPress 6.5

This one-hour session explores the recent changes to the Block Hooks API in WordPress 6.5 with one of the lead developers, Bernie Reiter. In addition to covering the basics, we’ll look at practical examples that you can implement in your own projects.

First introduced in WordPress 6.4, Block Hooks provides an extensibility mechanism for Block Themes. It allows you to inject a dynamic block in a location specified by an “anchor” block and a relative position. For example, you could automatically insert an eCommerce Shopping Cart block at the end of a site’s Navigation block from a plugin.

The API emulates WordPress’ Hooks concept, which allows you to extend Classic Themes using filters and actions. It’s one of the most exciting new features for extenders and will see numerous enhancements in WordPress 6.5.