Home

Akeeba Onthos

Clean up the muck on your Joomla! site

Downloads • Documentation • Issues

What's this?

This is an advanced extensions manager for Joomla!.

It makes it easy to clean up the mess left behind after years of maintaining the same site out there in the real world.

Why not just use Joomla's Extensions Manager

Onthos is NOT meant to fully replace Joomla's Extensions Manager. It is a specialty tool for professionals and power users who need to clean up their sites, or get more detailed information about their installed extensions.

Joomla's Extensions Manager is a great, but conservative, tool. Its target audience is the average, not very technical user. It has a lot of protections built into it which prevent users from taking potentially dangerous actions. It also provides a lot more optional protections third party developers can use in their extensions, if they so choose. This is all great, but the messiness of real world sites mean that you eventually end up with half installed extensions, phantom extension records, broken update sites and so on and so forth.

Onthos is designed to fix these problems.

It provides very detailed information about your installed extensions such as the extensions included in a package (even if some are not currently installed), the list of files and folders which make up the extension, the extension's tables, and more.

Onthos is not content just listing extensions. It analyses them and figures out potential issues. Each issue is given an explanation, a solution, and in most cases a button so you can apply the solution. Long gone are the days where you had to be a developer to understand what is going on with a zombified extension, or perform database surgery to fix your site. Onthos will handle that for you from its user interface.

If you want to uninstall an extension and Joomla won't let you –or the extension is so old its uninstallation crashes– Onthos is your best friend. It has four levels of uninstallation going from Joomla's “maybe uninstall” to Onthos' Forced Uninstall which will uninstall that extension, period.

With great power comes great responsibility

Onthos is very powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. It is easy to go too far and break your site. We always recommend taking a backup of your site with our free-of-charge Akeeba Backup CORE extension before taking any actions on it with Onthos, and keep that backup safely somewhere outside your site's server.

Kindly note that Onthos is strictly limited to Super Users. This is a check hardwired in the code. It doesn't matter what you choose in the Permissions tab of the Options page. This is not a bug, it's a deliberate design choice.

Copyright

Onthos - Clean up the muck on your Joomla! site

Copyright (C) 2024 Akeeba Ltd

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

What's in a name

Onthos is pronounced ON-thoss. The "th" sound is the same as in "theory". The stress is on the first syllable.

This is an Ancient Greek word (ὄνθος) which means animal dung, muck.

According to the legend, one of Hercules' feats was cleaning the dung from the stables of Augeas. The stables of Augeas were populated by immortal cattle which produced copious amounts of dung and had never been cleaned.

This component aims to clean the copious amounts of dung produced by a lifetime of updates, downgrades, and real world complications which are hard to imagine and even harder to reproduce in the clean lab environment used by Joomla! core maintainers when writing the extensions manager shipped with Joomla! itself. A Herculean task, indeed.