BuddyPress.org

@stwc
No need for hanging your head anywhere I still remember being really confused by all that filter-action-akadabra-hook-mumbo-jumbo. I’d been using it for a while knowing that it did the things I wanted without really understanding how it did it. Once you do understand it though, it opens up a lot of possibilities, especially when it comes to making your own themes/plugins pluggable.

Actions basically add things like markup and/or server-side validation exactly at the point where the do_action calls appear, while filters let you modify/change existing data, like variables, objects or arrays whenever there is a apply_filters call…