talk/docs/source/03-01-product-guide-how-talk-works.md

---
title: How Talk Works
permalink: /how-talk-works/
---

Talk is an open-source commenting platform. It has two pieces. One is the
embedded script, which allows newsrooms to have a unique comments section on
each story/post/page they have on their site, and allows their readers to
comment and discuss articles. The other is the Admin, which is where newsrooms
moderate their comments and manage and configure Talk.

## Talk Core

As we’re building Talk, our vision was always to have it be very modular, so
there are features we have built and are opinionated about, but we allow
newsrooms and their developers to customize Talk easily so that it fits their
use cases and needs.

Talk Core is the core application of Talk - this contains all of the standard
commenting features that are necessary for a comment section, and ones that we
believe are important to be universal. If you would like to contribute to Talk,
be sure to check out our
[Contributor's Guide](https://github.com/coralproject/talk/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md).

## Plugins

Plugins are additional functionality which are optional to use with Talk. You
can turn these on or off, depending on your specific needs. Plugins are either
part of our core plugins, which ship with Talk, or they are developed by 3rd
parties and either used privately and internally, or are open sourced for use
across the greater community. You can explore the plugins we offer by visiting our [Plugin Directory](/talk/plugins-directory/).

## Recipes

Recipes are plugin templates that are created by the Talk team and 3rd party
developers, in order to help contributors and newsrooms build plugins easily.
You can explore the recipes we offer by visiting our [Plugin Recipes](/talk/plugin-recipes/)
page.