Rails plugins vs discourse plugins - what is the difference?

[merefield (Robert)]

Here’s an interesting related discussion:

Adding jsonb columns for custom fields

Often times when developing plugins, I’ve had to use the CustomField or PluginRowStore tables to store arbitrary data related to the plugin (for example, retort stores a string representation of reactions to a particular post as a PostCustomField) This works well for simple data, but for anything a bit more complex, I’ve found myself wanting access to more than a postgres text-valued column can provide. Postgres has supported the jsonb column type for several versions now (since 9.4), which pro…