Customization points
Developers can customize the application, changing its look and feel, adding new widgets or macros, even adding new features. Most of this kind of work is done by developing a plugin that's based on the same technologies that the application itself uses.
Themes
With themes, you can restyle the user interface. In this way you can add a look and feel that identifies the community with your brand characteristics (logo, colors, and so on). You can also restyle particular parts of the application, such as to give certain kinds of content or certain spaces their own character. Themes don't require a plugin.
When developing themes, you can take one of three approaches: basic changes through the UI, minor changes to code by Customizing UI with the Theme Resource Kit, and Advanced Themes Topics.
Plugins
A plugin is the most common way to customize and extend the application.
Widgets
Widgets are views on content with which people can customize certain pages. Jive includes many widgets by default, but developers can build their own using the plugin framework.
Actions
Building an action plugin is one way to add more involved functionality. For example, a custom action could be behind a feature through which people could choose a number of documents to package into a single PDF file.
Custom authentication provider
A custom authentication provider knows how to authenticate people against a data source that isn't supported by default. For the list of supported authentication services, see Setting up LDAP and Active Directory.