Mechanism to override standard actions with custom versions

It would be very useful if we could override lots of the inbuilt actions, but in such a way that it's centrally managed and easy to maintain/audit for site admins.

For example, Adaptavist's "Community Bubbles" plugin introduces a very flexible user lister that could be used to replace the inbuilt people directory. Currently there is no way that the People Directory can be overridden with our own action.

What we need is a way to specify that actions in our plugins are "alternate" versions of existing actions (and specifically which actions). Note: It's possible that one action in our plugin could be used to replace several standard actions.

In the admin area, a site admin could then display a list of all inbuilt actions that support overriding and against each action there would be a drop-down list showing the Confluence standard action (default selection) and a list of any other alternate actions available in the installed plugins. The admin would simply select the desired replacement from the list and any requests to the inbuilt action would then be sent directly to the alternate version.

Should the third party plugin be uninstalled or otherwise become unavailable, Confluence would fall back to the original Confluence version of the action until the plugin is restored or an admin chooses an action from a different plugin.

Adaptavist have a growing need to replace the following items:

• People directory
• Create space screen
• User profile (just about everything in here LOL)
• Browse space - specifically the tree, recently updated, index actions

There will be lots of others, but those listed above are our main priorities. For example, if we can take over the personal profile, we'll be able to use our Bubbles Plugin to create this very quickly indeed: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Personal+Homepage

We've got everything lined up and are ready to rumble, but not being able to override those default actions is preventing us from doing anything more than cludgy hacks. We want the personal profile to be the "personal home page" - a dashboard for the user.

On other projects we've tried making the home page of the personal space in to this sort of dashboard but it didn't work well as users then get very confused between their personal profile, their personal space and their personal "dashboard" living on the home page of their personal space.