Actions - akeeba/onthos GitHub Wiki

Actions

Onthos displays six different actions for each extension.

Enable

Sets the extension's status to Published.

Disable

Sets the extension's status to Unpublished.

Unpublished extensions are not loaded by Joomla!; it's as if the extension in question has not been installed. Furthermore, if a component is unpublished all menu link items pointing to that component no longer work. Any cross-links to that component from other components, modules, plugins, or templates will result in an error page stating “Component not found”.

Protect

Marks an extension as protected.

Only core Joomla! extensions should be marked as Protected. Protected extensions cannot be uninstalled by Joomla's Extensions Manager. Onthos does have a feature to unprotect and uninstall these extensions.

Unprotect

Marks an extension as NOT protected.

You should never unprotected core Joomla! extensions. This will make them uninstallable using Joomla's Extensions Manager. Uninstalling core extensions can cause stability or security issues to your site in the long term. If you want to prevent access to a core Joomla extension you should just Disable it instead!

Lock

Sets an extension to Locked.

Locked extensions cannot be enabled or disabled by Joomla's Extensions Manager (Onthos will enable or disable them regardless; Onthos, due to its nature as your last resort in extension management, does not honor the locked status). Only select core extensions fundamental to the operation of Joomla –such the Users component– need to be locked. You can lock third party extensions to prevent your clients from messing with third party extensions critical to their site's operation, but you MUST make a note somewhere so future you doesn't get caught out by this non-standard behaviour!

Unlock

Sets an extension to Unlocked.

Rebuild menus

Only valid for components.

Rebuilds the component's administrator menu items.

This is useful if, for any reason, the installation or update of the component failed to install or update the administrator menu items for the component. We've seen that happening randomly in a minority of updates.

It is also invaluable for developers. Typically, developers would have to create an installable package and install it on a dev or test site to confirm that the admin menu structure they had set up in the XML manifest is valid, and works as expected. This was simple enough when admin menus were just links to specific component views. With new features in Joomla! 4 and later such as dashboards and submenu icons this is no longer straightforward, wasting a lot of time and effort in the package-then-install part of testing. With Onthos you only have to deploy your XML manifest into the component's admin folder, then use the Rebuild Menus feature on the component. We have found that this increases productivity for this use case quite a bit.

Danger Zone

This drop-down shows you the different uninstallation options available.

It's marked as the “Danger Zone” because uninstalling an extension can be dangerous. At the very least, you have to be perfectly sure you're uninstalling the right extension!