You could definitely include them in the same repo. In your local, put the renamed repos in your nodebb/node_modules folder. (make sure you change the name in their package.json and plugin.json too) Then put an exclusion in your .gitignore for that directory, example !node_modules/nodebb-theme-my-persona then git add node_modules/nodebb-theme-my-persona and when you push your changes, it should include the plugin. What you set in the ACP is saved in the database, so it should persist. For user uploads, you should be using an external service like imgur, or the uploads may not persist between pushes.

You've put port 8080 in "url". This should be the actual URL that people visit, and not the port on which the server should listen. You can specify the actual listen-port in config.json as follows: "port": 8080, This will fix the emoji-issue you're talking about (along with many other problems that may come up because the clients are trying an unresolvable port 8080) Source: https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/configuring/config.html