# 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:** 3

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### Author: ![sarahann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/sarahann/32/96703_2.png) [@sarahann](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sarahann)
#### Post date: [March 29, 2018, 11:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/customizing-handlebars-templates/84186/3 "2018-03-29T23:56:14Z")

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Thanks for the super quick reply!! 🙂 This has been super helpful!

But I have a few more questions now.

> [@david](#):
>
> 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.

I was wondering more if the plugin outlet ([Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin](https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-creating-discourse-plugins-part-1/30515)) and the pluginAPI ([A versioned API for client side plugins](https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-new-versioned-api-for-client-side-plugins/40051)) do the same thing? Their implementation is different, as one is a plugin added to discourse and the other is part of the HTML/JS. Is one of these methods preferred? Cause you also mentioned that:

> [@david](#):
>
> Plugin outlets are a far better way to extend things, they shouldn’t be broken by changes made to Discourse.

So does that mean that the pluginAPI isn’t as resilient to changes as the plugin outlets?

> [@david](#):
>
> 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:

I was hoping not to use ‘display: none’. I was snooping through some sites that have customized Discourse and came across this one. [Overwatch Forums](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch)  
It looks really clean, but lots of the out-of-the-box functionality is removed from the UI. I don’t see any ‘display: none’ to remove the functionality. Could it be that Blizzard used the pluginAPI or plugin outlet to replace some of the handlebars files, and omitted some of the code?

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