What is the best way to hook a rewrite function for certain php code when plugins are updated?

Question

I often times make a bunch of customizations on plugins I install from the WP repository. Typically the reason I find myself preforming these edits is to fix, rewrite or delete certain functions a plugin might be preforming such as:

• the plugin is automatically inserting a new menu/sub-menus in an undesirable location which I prefer to have standardized in accordance with my organization.
• I simply want to remove, edit or replace text or functions for things such as help links/pages, redundant donation buttons or annoying upgrade promotion dialog boxes.

In end effect the edits I end up preforming are totally unique to each individual plugin and/or its files.

The problem I constantly run into is keeping up to-date with the latest version while manually updating the code for each plugin.

I believe the typical way users deal with this problem is by writing a function which takes priority over the plugins function (correct?). I can understand this approach working fine when the plugin/function I want to edit is simple but some of these plugins are very complex in nature and it seems this might not be the best approach.

What I am really hoping for is a clean method to be able to automatically execute a type of regex "find and replace" on the plugins new source code/files prior to the plugin being updated. I understand this method is in no way bulletproof and plugins/code is always changing however some type of function like this would be very helpful... any suggestions?

Answer 1

There is no clean solution to this, because task is, well, dirty. :) You should really be making these modifications in a proper ways.

If I absolutely had to do this (and even than probably for specific plugin and not at scale), I would look into maintaining my changes as vendor branch in version control and rebase on top of new releases. Even then it's not really convenient or maintenance-light solution.