Keeping tabs on WordPress actions
If you’ve ever needed to see if an action has been fired and/or how many times it has been fired, there’s a handy function that will return the amount of times an action has been fired.
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/did_action/
This function can come in handy when building things that could be extended by other developers that may want to filter out something.
I noticed it use in the WP-Shortcake plugin (https://github.com/wp-shortcake/shortcake/blob/7c9f5483b9ca10d38fa9412b264a2e6d1e12d528/inc/class-shortcode-ui.php)
The plugin introduces a Shortcode Interface on post edit pages, but only if a specific shortcode ui has been registered.
To register a UI for a plugin, an array of settings must be passed to the “register_shortcode_ui” action, but if that’s not done, the Shortcake UI is never loaded, all because of the “did_action” check.
This is a handy way to make code extendable, but avoid unnecessary bloat.