Title: Theme / Plugin Differences for Similar Functionality
Last modified: August 3, 2017

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# Theme / Plugin Differences for Similar Functionality

 *  [whatadewitt](https://wordpress.org/support/users/whatadewitt/)
 * (@whatadewitt)
 * [8 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/theme-plugin-differences-for-similar-functionality/)
 * Howdy!
 * I’m playing around with having some custom themes/plugins be setup on Github,
   mostly following this guideline: [https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/distributing-your-plugins-in-github-with-automatic-updates–wp-34817](https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/distributing-your-plugins-in-github-with-automatic-updates–wp-34817)
 * This works brilliantly for plugins, and I have it set up similarly for themes
   using ‘pre_set_site_transient_update_themes’ instead of ‘pre_set_site_transient_update_plugins’,
   with one small exception…
 * When I set my the “transient response” ($transient->response[$theme_name]), I
   have to pass an array, rather than an object like I did with my plugin code. 
   This was not a very simple thing to discover, and ended up digging around in 
   Core for a while before I found my answer.
 * My assumption is that these hooks were created at different times in WordPress’
   lifecycle, and it would make sense that maybe they were handled differently then,
   but I think it would be nice if we could have consistency around things like 
   this, as I am sure it is happening at a few different places in Core. If there’s
   a simple explanation around why this was built this way, I’m happy to take that,
   I just got a bit frustrated working on something today and this ended up taking
   me longer than I’d expected to figure out.
 * Thank you,
 * –d

The topic ‘Theme / Plugin Differences for Similar Functionality’ is closed to new
replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [whatadewitt](https://wordpress.org/support/users/whatadewitt/)
 * Last activity: [8 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/theme-plugin-differences-for-similar-functionality/)
 * Status: not a support question

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