Intro to Customizing Discourse

There are two main systems for building Discourse customizations:

• Themes and Theme Components can by used to modify the look & feel of the site, and modify behaviours in the frontend (JavaScript) applications. Multiple themes and theme components can be installed on a site, combined in different ways, and made available for users to choose from.

• Plugins have similar capabilities for modifying the frontend, plus the ability to modify backend (Ruby) behaviour. They can modify existing Discourse features, or create totally new features.