In this article, we investigate the construction of linear codes over a finite ring $\mathcal{S}$, where $\mathcal{S}$ is taken to be an extension of a commutative non-unital ring $I$ of order $p^2$. Our approach is based on the defining set method. The defining sets considered in this work are derived from general simplicial complexes that may contain multiple maximal elements. We determine the parameters of these codes over $\mathcal{S}$ and study their Gray images. We also study the corresponding subfield-like codes. We show that these Gray image codes and subfield-like codes produce several families of divisible codes. Furthermore, we establish sufficient conditions under which these codes are minimal, optimal, and self-orthogonal. As applications of our results, we obtain several families of projective few-weight codes, and locally recoverable codes with small locality. We also study the minimal access structures of secret-sharing schemes associated with the duals of these minimal codes. Moreover, we construct several families of strongly regular graphs from projective two-weight codes and determine their parameters explicitly.