# Customizing handlebars templates

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/customizing-handlebars-templates/84186
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [March 29, 2018, 11:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/customizing-handlebars-templates/84186 "2018-03-29T23:23:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![david](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/david/32/157490_2.png) [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2018, 11:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/customizing-handlebars-templates/84186/2 "2018-03-29T23:41:00Z")

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Here are some brief answers:

> [@sarahann](#):
>
> Is one of them considered Discourse’s ‘best practice’  
> Is one of them more maintainable and resilient to changes made in Discourse?

Plugin outlets are a far better way to extend things, they shouldn’t be broken by changes made to Discourse.

> [@sarahann](#):
>
> What is the difference between overwriting using a plugin outlet and the pluginAPI? Is there a difference aside from their implementation? Do these two achieve the exact same thing?

Overriding a template will “replace” it. Plugin outlets are simply points in the page that you can “insert” content into. If you want to add content, a plugin outlet might be enough. Overriding templates should always be a last resort.

> [@sarahann](#):
>
> Is one more performant than another?

No, I don’t think so

> [@sarahann](#):
>
> How do you extend Discourse’s current handlebars file and add some of your own custom code?

You can’t really “extend” the templates, only replace them. The “how to customise discourse templates” link you posted has an example, but plugin outlets would be better.

> [@sarahann](#):
>
> How do you delete/remove some of Discourse’s functionality

The easiest way is through CSS changes in a theme as you mentioned. You could have a look at this theme, which @joebuhlig uses to hide a number of discourse features:

> [@Joe's Personal Discourse Theme](https://meta.discourse.org/t/joes-personal-discourse-theme/83342):
>
> Here’s what may be a new way to use Discourse. Though I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, I haven’t seen any posts about it. I’ve started a new private instance of Discourse that is designed to be a notes app replacement. Think of Evernote or OneNote but it’s Discourse and for only a single person. It occurred to me that all of these notes apps have things like URLs per note, APIs for interacting with the notes, email in, and the ability to share notes with others. But those are all t…

Hope that helps a bit - if you can describe which bit of discourse you want to change then it will be easier for people to give more specific advice.

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