Introducing WP Events, a simple event listener pattern for WordPress

Update:

I've archived this repo. While it is dependency-free, it's very similar to Wordpress' native filters & action features. Given that they're core to WP, I would advise using them instead of this package.

---

I started the year off by open-sourcing a helper I wrote for a previous project. I've been using this helper in other projects ever since.

WP Events is a super-simple event / listener pattern library for Wordpress and other applications. Example use:

Declaring events

wp_events_register([
    ...
    'user_signup' => [
        'send_welcome_email',
        'send_slack_notification'
    ],
]);

In this example, the user_signup_event will call the send_welcome_email and send_slack_notification listeners. It will also deliver a payload to each listener.

Dispatching events

Using the example above, this is how we can dispatch an event anywhere in our application.

wp_events_dispatch('user_signup', $email);

Handling events in listeners

Next, each listener we registered will be provided the payload from our wp_events_dispatch() function.

function send_welcome_email($email)
{
    // do something with $email
}

function send_slack_notification($email)
{
    // do something with $email
}

Multiple inputs

This can also handle multiple inputs:

wp_events_dispatch('user_signup', $name, $email);

Which you can accept in your listeners:

function send_slack_notification($name, $email)
{
    // do something with $name and $email
}

This allows you to write event / listener patterns in Wordpress. While I wrote this in and for a Wordpress project, it can be used in any PHP application. It does not have any dependencies on Wordpress whatsoever.

PRs welcome! View the repo here: github.com/christopherarter/wp-events