title: PluginMechanism

!Introduction
TiddlyWiki5 is based on a 500 line boot kernel that runs on node.js or in the browser, and everything
else is plugins.

The kernel boots just enough of the TiddlyWiki environment to allow it to load tiddlers as plugins and execute them (a barebones tiddler class, a barebones wiki store class, some utilities etc.). Plugin modules are written like `node.js` modules; you can use `require()` to invoke sub components and to control load order.

There are several different types of plugins: parsers, serializers, deserializers, macros etc. It goes much further than you might expect. For example, individual tiddler fields are plugins, too: there's a plugin that knows how to handle the `tags` field, and another that knows how to handle the special behaviour of
the `modified` and `created` fields.

Some plugins have further sub-plugins: the wikitext parser, for instance, accepts rules as individual plugins.

!Plugins and Modules
In TiddlyWiki5, a plugin is a bundle of related tiddlers that are distributed together as a single unit. Plugins can include tiddlers which are JavaScript modules. These modules are executed by the kernel, and the resulting