Plugins
Plugins are small task oriented extensions that enhance the Joomla! framework. Some are associated with particular extensions and others, such as editors, are used across all of Joomla. Most beginning users do not need to change any of the plugins that install with Joomla. Help
Quick Icons
 The Quick Icon plugin group is used to provide notification that updates to Joomla! or installed extensions are available and should be applied. These notifications display on your administrator control panel, which is the page you see when you first log in to your site administrator.
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Search
The search component uses plugins to control which parts of your Joomla! site are searched. You may choose to turn off some areas to improve performance or for other reasons. Many third party Joomla! extensions have search plugins that extend where search takes place.
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Captcha
The Captcha plugins are used to prevent spam submissions on your forms such as registration, contact and login. You basic installation of Joomla includes one Captcha plugin which leverages the ReCaptcha® service but you may install other plugins connecting to different Captcha systems.
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- ReCaptcha help
Note: ReCaptcha is a the trademark of Google Inc. and is an independent product not associated with or endorsed by the Joomla Project. You will need to register and agree to the Terms of Service at Recaptcha.net to use this plugin. Complete instructions are available if you edit the ReCaptcha plugin in the Plugin Manager.
System
System plugins operate every time a page on your site loads. They control such things as your URLS, whether users can check a "remember me" box on the login module, and whether caching is enabled. New is the redirect plugin that together with the redirect component will assist you in managing changes in URLs.
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Authentication
The authentication plugins operate when users login to your site or administrator. The Joomla! authentication plugin is in operation by default but you can enable Gmail or LDAP or install a plugin for a different system. An example is included that may be used to create a new authentication plugin.
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- Joomla Help
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User
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- Joomla Help
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Two new plugins are available but are disabled by default.
- Contact Creator Help
Creates a new linked contact record for each new user created. - Profile Help
This example profile plugin allows you to insert additional fields into user registration and profile display. This is intended as an example of the types of extensions to the profile you might want to create.