There are pros and cons for both methods. Personally, I much prefer to put functionality in a plugin and the theme limited to the frontend presentation. To sug

There are pros and cons for both methods. Personally, I much prefer to put functionality in a plugin and the theme limited to the frontend presentation. To suggest that I don't know what I'm doing is, well... Incorrect. Syncing production, staging, and dev is an unrelated and solved problem.