How to Hide a Component in Joomla’s Backend Without Uninstalling It

It’s Friday, it’s sunny here in Montreal, the sky is blue, and we think it’s better to write about a Joomla tidbit instead of going out and enjoying the sun. How is that for dedication?

Anyway, if your Joomla backend is cluttered with extensions that you’re not using but you don’t want to install, then we have some good news for you: you can hide them (so that they won’t appear anywhere in your menu). You can do that without installing yet another 3rd party extension, you can do that without modifying the code or the filesystem, and you can do that without modifying the database through phpMyAdmin. Joomla has a little known secret (well, not anymore) that allows you to do that. All you need to do is the following:

  • Login to the backend of you Joomla website.
  • Click on Extensions -> Extension Manager on the top menu, and then click on Manage below.

  • Search for the extension that you want to hide (it might be anything: a component, a module, a plugin, a template, etc…).

  • Click on the green check mark next to it (under the Status column). That should turn it into a red hollow dot, which means that it’s disabled.

  • That’s it!

Note that doing the above will not delete any data associated with the extension, it’ll just hide the extension from your website.

But, what happens if you have created some modules and then you disabled the module’s extension?

That’s an interesting question. Try, for example, creating a Who’s Online module in the Module Manager, and then go to the Extensions Manager and disable the Who’s Online module extension. Now go back to the Module Manager, and you will notice an amber exclamation mark next to the module (instead of the green checkmark), if you hover over it it’ll read “Extension Disabled”. The module is still published but won’t display on the site because the extension has been disabled.

We hope that this little and light post was helpful to our readers.

Now, if you want to disable some extensions but the above is not working for you, then please contact us. We can help you do that in no time and for a very affordable fee. We are reliable, we are professional, and we are really, really friendly programmers (the term “friendly programmer” is typically an oxymoron by the way, which makes us unique amongst programmers)!

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