Hello, I'm fairly new to php development and I am very new to Laravel so please bear with me! I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for so I'll explain my issue quickly and if someone could just point me in the right direction (post, article, documentation) I'd be eternally grateful.

I have a basic app - a small cms - that I'm just pulling from a bitbucket repo to create small sites quickly. They all serve the same business model (equipment rental) but from site to site there will be small changes needed to extend the functionality.

What I'm looking to do is keep the base app in tact so that I can update the 'core' files from time to time and add a folder of some sort (that would be git ignored) to extend that base app's functionality. Specifically, there will be slight changes to my controllers - I'd love to just be able to override/extend the base controller method from another file (sort of like wordpress I suppose). Again, I know that is sort of a high level question and I've been reading about IoC, DI, and facades and I feel like I'm not quite putting it all together (in relation to this specific problem). Thank you in advance if you can point me to the right spot!