WordPress Plugin Hooks

Many WordPress Plugins accomplish their goals by connecting to one or more WordPress Plugin "hooks". The way Plugin hooks work is that at various times while WordPress is running, WordPress checks to see if any Plugins have registered functions to run at that time, and if so, the functions are run. These functions modify the default behavior of WordPress.
For instance, before WordPress adds the title of a post to browser output, it first checks to see if any Plugin has registered a function for the "filter" hook called "the_title". If so, the title text is passed in turn through each registered function, and the final result is what is printed. So, if your Plugin needs to add some information to the printed title, it can register a "the_title" filter function.
Another example is the "action" hook called "wp_footer". Just before the end of the HTML page WordPress is generating, it checks to see whether any Plugins have registered functions for the "wp_footer" action hook, and runs them in turn.
You can learn more about how to register functions for both filter and action hooks, and what Plugin hooks are available in WordPress, in the Plugin API. If you find a spot in the WordPress code where you'd like to have an action or filter, but WordPress doesn't have one, you can also suggest new hooks (suggestions will generally be taken); see Reporting Bugs to find out how.