"theme-component" should be a subcategory instead of a tag

[maiki]

@Decorbuz

At least for me, they’re easier to find compared to tags, and in recent years, theme components have become more and more significant in contrast to their plugin counterparts (many of which are being converted to theme components for easier use).

@justin

I do agree theme components are a bit more valuable for most Discourse sites these days.

@Stephen

Plugins really need to stay in their own category, don’t they?

Discourse theme components now support Wasm

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a technology that ships in all modern browsers that lets developers ship portable binary programs. This means that developers can use almost any programming language and target the web. In the context of Discourse this opens up the door to shipping a fairly rich set of extensions that were only available to plugin creators in the past. Examples could be: Image watermarking / resizing / cropping Graph generation using graphviz or svgbob Programming sandboxes (eg: a pos…

The difference between a theme component and plugin is already blurry in my head. Anything we can do to make it easier for folks to know which is which will go a long way, I’m sure.

This is kind of funny, for a long time WordPress developers had a call to make on where to include functionality, and debates were had on how much code belonged in a “theme” versus a “plugin”. That debate is almost quaint, now, where anything and everything is a JS block, but because of it’s relationship to the core software, we still have to figure out where code goes, in a “plugin” or a “block pattern”.

I’ve never had such a sense with plugins in Discourse, mostly because folks have come up with some brilliant theme component hacks over the years. If someone asked me what the difference between “plugins” and “theme components” is, my first thought would be: one takes a URL field to install, and the other requires a site rebuild.