Joomla User Manual

Introduction¶

Plugins are Joomla! extensions that do something behind the scenes in response to a trigger. There are about 160 core plugins in over 20 groups. Third party developers provide many more. The following image shows the start of the plugins list with the list length set to 5 for the convenience of the screenshot.

Plugin Types¶

In the plugins folder of your site you will see the types. For example, you will see a content folder, which contains plugins that manipulate content, and a user folder, which contains plugins to do with users. You can filter the list by Type or by Element, such as contact, which may include several Types.

Plugin Parameters¶

Plugins may have few or many parameters. For example, the Content - Email Cloaking plugin offers a choce of two cloaking methods wheras the Editors - TinyMCE plugin has a long list of optional parameters. All of the plugins have suitable defaults. Often all that needs to be done is Enable or Disable a particular plugin as need arises.

Plugin Execution¶

Plugin execution is triggered by an event. For example, the code that assembles an article for display has events named onContentAfterTitle, onContentBeforeDisplay and onContentAfterDisplay. They are used to position any user-defined fields in the selected locations.

Individual plugins¶

Very few of the individual plugins are documented here. They are covered by Type in the Help page of each plugin.