“Object Not Available” Strategies

There are times when you can’t get a hold of the object in order to remove a method callback from that object. The author wrote it such that s/he did not expose the object for you. What do you do? How can you get that object in order to do your work and unregister its callback?

Here are strategies in order:

1. Talk to the author and see s/he will add a filter or action to pass the object to you.
2. If it’s open source, submit a pull request to add the filter/action code.
3. Evaluate if you have to use this particular plugin.
4. If all else fails, then you may have to do it the hard way by manually removing it from the $wp_filter registry.

You can ask the author to do the following to make their code better:

$my_object = new My_Class();
do_action( 'plugin_name_object_created', $my_object );

DON’T ASK THEM TO MAKE IT A GLOBAL VARIABLE!!!