Wordpress has great filter support for getting at all sorts of specific bits of content and modifying it before output. Like "the_content" filter, which lets you access the markup for a post before it's output to the screen.
I'm trying to find a catch-all filter that gives me one last crack at modifying the final markup in its entirety before output. Anyone know of one?
I've browsed the list of filters a number of times, but nothing jumps out at me: http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks/hook/filters
(I've tapped some Wordpress-specific communities for this question, but not having received a single reply, thought I'd turn to the venerable SO.)
WordPress doesn't have a "final output" filter, but you can hack together one. The below example resides within a "Must Use" plugin I've created for a project.
Note: I haven't tested with any plugins that might make use of the "shutdown" action.
The plugin works by iterating through all the open buffer levels, closing them and capturing their output. It then fires off the "final_output" filter, echoing the filtered content.
Sadly, WordPress performs almost the exact same process (closing the open buffers), but doesn't actually capture the buffer for filtering (just flushes it), so additional "shutdown" actions won't have access to it. Because of this, the below action is prioritized above WordPress's.
wp-content/mu-plugins/buffer.php
An example of hooking into the final_output filter:
Edit:
This code uses anonymous functions, which are only supported in PHP 5.3 or newer. If you're running a website using PHP 5.2 or older, you're doing yourself a disservice. PHP 5.2 was released in 2006, and even though Wordpress STILL supports it, you should not use it.
Try to solve it with JavaScript first before using output buffers.
Let's say you want to add a spinner while loading iframes, for example:
Adapt that idea to your needs, usually you should be able to manipulate HTML output with JavaScript without the need to mess with output buffers, that can break cache, for instance.
AFAIK, there is no hook for this, since the themes uses HTML which won't be processed by WordPress.
You could, however, use output buffering to catch the final HTML:
the question is maybe old, but i have found a better way to do it.
Explanation This plugin code registers two actions –
buffer_start
andbuffer_end
.buffer_start
is executed at the end of the header section of the html. The parameter, thecallback
function, is called at the end of the output buffering. This occurs at the footer of the page, when the second registered action,buffer_end
, executes.The
callback
function is where you add your code to change the value of the output (the$buffer
variable). Then you simply return the modified code and the page will be displayed.Notes Be sure to use unique function names for
buffer_start
,buffer_end
, andcallback
, so they do not conflict with other functions you may have in plugins.You might try looking in the wp-includes/formatting.php file. For example, the wpautop function. If you are looking for doing something with the entire page, look at the Super Cache plugin. That writes the final web page to a file for caching. Seeing how that plug-in works may give you some ideas.
Indeed there was a discusussion recently on the WP-Hackers mailing list about the topic of full page modification and it seems the consensus was that output buffering with ob_start() etc was the only real solution. There was also some discussion about the upsides and downsides of it: http://groups.google.com/group/wp-hackers/browse_thread/thread/e1a6f4b29169209a#
To summarize: It works and is the best solution when necessary (like in the WP-Supercache plugin) but slows down overall speeds because your content isn't allowed to be sent to the browser as its ready, but instead has to wait for the full document to be rendered (for ob_end() ) before it can be processed by you and sent to the browser.