How to tell which Plugin is displaying?

Question

I'm editing a Wordpress website for a client that was written by someone else. I'm noticing that a video and button are displayed on the home page. I used the Reveal-Template plugin to figure out which template was displaying but I can't seem to figure out which plugin is being used to display the video and button. I'm sure it's a plugin too because I changed the video yesterday.

The problem I'm trying to fix is that I want to put a link on the button but currently, it only gets set by a drop down menu. This means I'll need to go and edit the plugin being used to allow for a URL instead of just internal pages.

If I could figure out which plugin it is, I would go edit that code. Does anyone have a good way of figuring this out? I'm very new to Wordpress development so I apologize if this is a really basic question. Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

It can be less than trivial to match output to a source code responsible in WordPress.

The typical cases are following:

1. The output is produced by template file directly. The locating template responsible is often about just searching for full or partial text match. From the other side template files can be identified among all files being loaded.

2. Output is produced by function call in template file. This is not far from previous case, but can be slightly trickier since code definitions is now in separate place from code execution.

3. Output is produced by function call, hooked to an action/filter. This can be nightmarish to unwrap, especially in cases of things getting nested.

In a nutshell good search tool is always a solid start. After that it's matter of what you typically work with and what tools are fitting for that. Personally I find Query Monitor plugin striking good balance in providing debug information but not too much information.