Plugin authors devote so much time and energy into the main functionality of their products, that they allow less important stuff to fall by the wayside.<\/p>\n
Take activation and deactivation, for example. While activation hooks are widespread\u00a0\u2013 many\u00a0plugins need to add some options, flush rewrite rules, maybe create a database table, or check for version differences on installation \u2013 deactivation and uninstallation hooks are far less common.<\/p>\n
The point here? Many plugin authors don’t take the time to clean up after themselves. Does the WordPress installation really need the custom table you created after removing the plugin? Why not clear out a few options that are exclusive to the plugin before trashing it?<\/p>\n
In this article, I’ll show you how to use activation, deactivation and uninstallation hooks to initialize your plugin and clean things up more easily after users are done with your product.<\/p>\n
Note: If you plan to skim through this article, I strongly suggest taking a peek at the “Additional Security” section at the end, which complements the code with some valuable security checks. Also, if you need help with WordPress plugin hooks, here is a quick refresher on\u00a0using WordPress hooks<\/a> and how to activate a function in WordPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although the activation hook is quite straightforward, installing it is a bit of a special case, so we’ll need to pay attention to the sequence of events. Before we go into all this, here’s a simple example:<\/p>\nThe Activation Hook<\/h2>\n