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Akeeba Onthos

Advanced extensions insight and management for Joomla!

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What's this?

Onthos is an advanced, powerful extensions introspection and management tool for Joomla!. It is designed for power users, site maintainers, and extension developers.

You can see all first and third party extensions installed on your Joomla! site, identify and correct issues, uninstall any extension Joomla! fails to uninstall, and even remove leftover extension records for extensions whose files are long gone.

In short, it makes it easy to clean up the mess left behind after years of maintaining the same real world site.

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, by necessity, 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 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 which lets you apply a solution to the detected problem. Long gone are the days when you had to be a developer to understand what is going on with a “zombie” extension, or perform database surgery to fix your site. Onthos will handle that for you from its user interface.

Onthos is your best friend if you want to uninstall an extension and Joomla won't let you; for example, when the extension is so old its uninstallation causes PHP errors. It has four levels of uninstallation going from Joomla's “uninstall in favorable conditions” to Onthos' Forced Uninstall which will uninstall that extension, with extreme prejudice.

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 - Advanced extensions insight and management for Joomla!

Copyright (C) 2024-2025 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.