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Hi all,
I haven’t done any serious web development in 8 years but I’m currently helping a friend set up what will hopefully be a high-traffic political commentary website. So, I’m very rusty when it comes to “proper” development but easily able to make kludgy hotfixes to stuff I want to change.
At the moment I am frequently finding that various plugins don’t do exactly what I want them to, mostly in terms of their appearance, but sometimes in terms of the actual PHP code they use. I address all appearance-related issues in my child theme to avoid updates overriding my changes. But, when I need to mess with the actual code, I’m just using a plugin editor and then saving the edited files locally, so I can just reupload them when I next update the relevant plugins.
Obviously this is a bit of a naff workflow compared to theme customisation. I know there are plugins that are addons for other plugins, so I was wondering: Is there a good beginner’s guide somewhere on how to create “child plugins” that just hook into other plugins and override certain files from them, like child themes do?
I feel like it would make more sense for me to wrap all my customisations in a localised plugin than to screw around with edits to existing plugins and then having to do a whole spiel every time I need to update them.