If y'all have not taken a look at the 'community customizations' plugin @ github.. you shud. you'll find a very good example of 'my custom plugin..' to extend, enhance whatever feature/s, functionality anywhere - as wanted -- via *a plugin* - no hack/s at all. do yourselves a favor and browse that - to get ideas of how much easier coding life can be, while maintaining suitability, upgradeability, an etc`s. hope y'all  find that doing changes this-a-way is actually the *real quick n easy way' not the quickie 'hack cracks'.

@DhrupDeScoop, I was looking for 'community customizations' plugin @ github. I only found the plugin which is on the process by Cash and Evan Winslow... Tha is the only plugin called community customizations

I was looking for your example of 'my custom plugin..' to extend, enhance whatever feature/s but could not find it. I look in the elgg community but could not find it either. I am trying to follow your advise so that I  change the Elgg core and plugins via *a plugin* - no hack/s at all to the core files.

Is there any why you can assist me to find the  right place or code as you wrote on the comment http://community.elgg.org/pages/view/880143/dont-modify-core#page-comments 

@Tom, I made something for this just a few days ago; MyTheme plugin

Just a note that several hours ago we merged community into elgg.org, running on Elgg 2.0 beta. Unfortunately until a few minutes ago our home page was a PHP parse error. :(

When we can re-enable blogs, a more official post may appear. Currently we can't post to discussions either.

Bugs: We've surely got em. Please report new ones to our www.elgg.org repo, unless you know the issue belongs in one of the other repos like community_theme/community_plugins.