1) If I am using k2 for everything (except for Home page ofcourse), is it better I have these default Joomla plugins disabled?

Content - Joomla
Content - Email Cloaking
Content - Pagebreak
Content - Page Navigation
Content - Vote

Are the above plugins related to joomla contents (articles)? When I dont use Joomla's content component and if I disable the above, would that affect K2 component or my site in anyways when everything is on K2?

2) What are the K2's Josetta plugins for?

Josetta - K2 Categories
Josetta - K2 Items

3) If I disable the unused plugins in general, would that improve joomla's performance in any ways?

4) Lastly, when creating a Category in k2, under the "Item view options in category listings" and "Item view options" settings, there is an option for "Enable K2 plugins". When I set it to No, I still dont see any effect on K2 pages. What does the plugin do? When do I need to usually select 'yes' for this option? Would setting this to no when not needed improve k2 page loads in some way?

1) As K2 extends Joomla core content system, K2 components can use all Joomla content pugins, so I think disabling those plugins may affect K2 component, although it will not break it totally, but some features will not work.

2) In general, Josetta plugins are used for translation in multilanguage websites.

3) Disabling unused plugins will improve the performance.

4) "Enable K2 plugin" in this context is relevant to this specific category, if you set it to No, it will disable K2 plugins in this category listing and item view pages.

Plugins are extending the functionality and adding more features, so disabling them may not have noticable effect because their extended functionalities or new features are not used in those pages.

So, you need to set it to 'Yes' where you want the plugins functionality to be called.

In general, disabling unused plugins will improve the performance for some extent, and will avoid vulnerabilities in some of them as well.

Hope this answer can help.

Hi Mohamed Abdelaziz,

Thanks you so much for your reply. It sure was helpful. I will probably leave the Joomla plugins active then just incase since k2 might be using some of them.

With the Josetta plugins, I might disable them if its just for translation purposes. Mine is just English based site and not multilingual so I might not need these then.

I will go through the full list and start disable plugins I am not using since it will help with the performance in some ways. Similarly, I also see there are a lot of plugins for smart search and com search. Once I figure out which one I am gonna use, I will disable the rest.

Lastly, I might set no for "Enable K2 plugin" in k2 categories too. Since I dont see any difference when this is set to no in k2 articles, I am assuming none of the k2 plugins are used in those categories. Once I check it fully I might disable it there too if its not necessary.

Thank you so much for your support. It helped me understand what to do next. I really appreciate it. :)

I would let the Enable K2 plugin setting to yes so you won't break the functionality of extension like AllVideos or Simple Image Gallery Pro which are pretty standard for K2 installations.

Other than this I think you are in the right track.

oh yeah... I never thought of Simple Image Gallery Pro. You are right, its probably better to leave plugins to yes in category settings then. Thanks for that. :)