How to add features to SNGINE without hooks

I had a small breakthough today.   I was able to add features without touching the codebase AT ALL.  

SNGINE unfortunately does not have a hook system like wordpress .. which allows developers to "hook in" to others work without overwriting.   

However, it requires making code changes that will get overwritten when Zamblek comes out with the next version.  Zamblek's  answer to this is a using DIFF tool.   Really?   How about adding some well placed hooks for us, Z?  Well, I use Github Desktop .. it makes things a bit easier .. but still merge conflicts are still gonna happen.   With 1 or 2 mods this is no big deal ... but if you want to add 20, 30 or more mods .. version updates are going to be real bear every 3-4 months.  Now imagine if you have a huge community to deal with on top of this.    

So after many rounds with Perplexity AI .. i came up with 2 methods to minimize, and even eliminate ever having to modify the core sngine code when adding features.   

Before we begin ... as you probably know .. clone your theme so you are not editing your "default" theme.   Most of you already know this, but I had to add this for those who didn't know they should.  

Magic Method #1:   Add Features without Changing the Core

After scourging through days of AI credits on Windsurf, I was finally able to add a very cool feature of geotagging user sessions.   What does this mean .. simply using IP addresses to find out where my users login from instead of relying on them to say "yes" to browser location.  The amazing part was .. I was able to do this without changing a single line of Zamblek's code.   

I did this by using "Auto-prepend" and using PHP extend and wrap as the article above pointed out.   By using Auto-prepend, I could hook into the Bootstrap process itself and add a "prepend.php" to every php execution.   While you can always hook into "bootstrap.php" yourself, you would be making a core change.    So .. This is how I did it:   

In .htaccess add this line:

php_value auto_prepend_file "${DOCUMENT_ROOT}/custom/prepend.php"

Now, every time php executes, my prepend.php runs first.   Then all I do, is extend and wrap existing classes.   ask AI how to do this, and it will show you.   Basically, it allows your code to run when let's say the "user class" is executed.   Then I registered a shutdown function and had it add my geolocation data to the database.   

Magic Method #2:  Last Resort Hooks

Unfortunately, Method #1 only works with public functions and methods .. however, sngine has many private functions too.  What do you do then?   Well, then if you must, you most likely have hook in the old fashioned way.   Of course, you could write down every hook and every line number so you remember next Sngine version what to reinstall .. but it's very likely the line numbers will be different in the next version.  

Enter Hooks.json ... a simple json file to tell AI how re-apply all of your last resort hooks as such:

Can you help me a bit? Check dm