Plug ins vs. Drop ins

Plug-in are any code that can be explicitly referred to from the application or platform, it has to be enabled somewhere in order for it to form part of the system. You may have many plug-ins that are installed but none of them may be in use.

Drop-ins are any code that is automatically used once it is installed, it does not have to be configured. It may inject itself into your application pages as menus or options, If you want to remove it you npm uninstall the whole drop-in. Depending on the design of the drop-in it could include some disabled features that have to be configured or some enabled features that can be disabled, but the general idea is drop and go.

One example, is user management that is currently part of the main UI, but is planned to be moved into a npm drop-in.

Drop ins can be designed to be framework and theme independent, or some drop-ins may have customized behavior for some themes, but we plan to establish basic comparability guides to allow drop-ins to be as useful across as many frameworks as possible.