Sort admin menu items

On a related note to “Changing the Order of Admin Menu Sections?”, I’m looking for a way to alphabetically sort the entries in each sub-section of WordPress’s admin area.

Currently, whenever a new plugin is added, its entry will appear in a seemingly random location under Settings / Tools / Plugins, and it’s often hard to locate the new menu item. (I have a lot of plugins already, so my menus are pretty full.)

Being that I add and remove plugins fairly regularly, I would rather not need to continually go into the settings page for a menu-ordering plugin and adjust the order.

Sorry for the long question; I just want to make it clear what I’m looking for.

Example

Instead of:

    Settings
    - General
    - Writing
    - Reading
    - Discussion
    - (rest of core items)
    - Plugin 4
    - WP something
    - A plugin to help with stuff
    - Google-related plugin
    - RSS plugin
    - FeedBurner plugin
    - etc.

Can I have the menu sorted alphabetically (or by another logical method), e.g.:

    Settings
    - A plugin to help with stuff
    - Discussion
    - FeedBurner plugin
    - General
    - Google-related plugin
    - Plugin 4
    - Reading
    - (rest of core items)
    - RSS plugin
    - WP something
    - Writing
    - etc.

Even better would be a sort method that keeps the core entries where they are by default and only sorts items added by plugins:

    Settings
    - General
    - Writing
    - Reading
    - Discussion
    - (rest of core items)
    - A plugin to help with stuff
    - FeedBurner plugin
    - Google-related plugin
    - Plugin 4
    - RSS plugin
    - WP something
    - etc.

It can be done sorting the global $submenu.

The sorting that’s applied resets the key number of the sub-array $submenu['options-general.php'], which is:

array
  'options-general.php' => 
    array
      10 => 
        array
          0 => string 'General'
          1 => string 'manage_options'
          2 => string 'options-general.php'
      15 => 
        array
          0 => string 'Writing'
          1 => string 'manage_options'
          2 => string 'options-writing.php'
      // etc

and becomes:

array
  'options-general.php' => 
    array
      0 => 
        array
          0 => string 'Discussion'
          1 => string 'manage_options'
          2 => string 'options-discussion.php'
      1 => 
        array
          0 => string 'General'
          1 => string 'manage_options'
          2 => string 'options-general.php'
      // etc

Here, we are considering the length of the default items equal to six. Prior to WordPress 3.5, there were 7 items, Privacy is now gone and embedded with the Reading tab.

Testing locally, this doesn’t produce any unexpected result and works ok. Maybe if a plugin depended on $submenu['options-general.php'][15] to position itself or something else, bugs could happen.

Sort is being applied separately for the default items and for the rest of them. Just disable the usort of the first block and you have your desired output.

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'sort_settings_menu_wpse_2331', 999 );

function sort_settings_menu_wpse_2331() 
{
    global $submenu;

    // Sort default items
    $default = array_slice( $submenu['options-general.php'], 0, 6, true );
    usort( $default, 'sort_arra_asc_so_1597736' );

    // Sort rest of items
    $length = count( $submenu['options-general.php'] );
    $extra = array_slice( $submenu['options-general.php'], 6, $length, true );
    usort( $extra, 'sort_arra_asc_so_1597736' );

    // Apply
    $submenu['options-general.php'] = array_merge( $default, $extra );
}

//http://stackoverflow.com/a/1597788/1287812
function sort_arra_asc_so_1597736( $item1, $item2 )
{
    if ($item1[0] == $item2[0]) return 0;
    return ( $item1[0] > $item2[0] ) ? 1 : -1;
}