Last week, a fellow WordPress developer and I were having a conversation about a particular feature that he’s been contracted to implement for an existing site.
In short, he was trying to decide between introducing the new feature in the form of a child theme or in the form of a plugin.
It’s a question that I see raised more often than not, but I think there’s a series of questions that we can ask ourselves before jumping into writing any code.
Generally, it has to do with the true definition of a theme and the true definition of a plugin. Of course, there’s room for deliberation, but here’s how I normally see it.