About Plain Hooks

Plain Hooks is an independent publication of practical WordPress guides. It covers the jobs that sit just outside writing posts: email, page structure, media sizes, logins and basic statistics.

What we publish

Every guide answers one concrete question, such as "why does my contact form mail never arrive?" or "how do I change the size of thumbnails that already exist?". We explain what WordPress core does on its own, which settings or hooks control the behaviour, and which kinds of plugins or external services fill the gaps. When we name a plugin or service, it is because it is widely used and documented, not because we are paid to mention it: Plain Hooks carries no affiliate links and no sponsored content.

How guides are written

• Function names, hooks and settings are checked against the official WordPress Developer Resources and the WordPress.org documentation.
• Rules imposed by third parties (mailbox providers' sender requirements, anti-spam law, Google's guidance on maintenance pages) are linked to the original source so you can read them yourself.
• We do not quote figures we cannot source. When something depends on your host or your theme, we say so.
• Pages are revised when WordPress changes behaviour; the date at the top of each guide shows the last revision.

About this domain

From about 2004 to 2011, shiftthis.net was the home of ShiftThis, a small independent developer that first published add-ons for instant-messaging programs (Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger) and later sold and documented WordPress plugins, among them a newsletter plugin, an SMTP mailer and a page-ordering tool. After that project ended, the domain was parked and then misused by unrelated spam sites. Plain Hooks is a new publication with no connection to ShiftThis or its author: none of the original texts, images or software are reused or distributed here. Because many people still follow old links to those plugin pages, the same addresses now carry new guides on the problems those plugins addressed, with modern solutions.

Corrections

If a guide is wrong or out of date, we want to know. The publisher's details are on the legal notice page.