Concept of plugin—what is a Joomla! plugin and how does it work?

As I have said previously, plugins are the smallest of Joomla! extensions and they work in a different way.

Components are placed usually in the central part of our site and are mostly used to display and organize our site content, such as articles, photo galleries, and even the products of a shop.

Modules tend to be smaller in complexity, work along components, and appear surrounding the central zone of our site.

Both these types of extensions show site visitors a wide variety of content, information, images, and so on.

Plugins work in a different fashion and, usually, more than displaying content, they are used to modify them. For this purpose, plugins are called in response to some Joomla! or user-defined events.

Joomla! events are a bit of a complex concept, but let's keep...