Clean up the muck on your Joomla! site
Onthos is an advanced, powerful extensions manager for Joomla! designed for power users, site maintainers, and extension developers.
Onthos not only lists your installed extensions, but also detects problems in their installation, proposes solutions, and offers actions to resolve those issues. It can uninstall extensions that Joomla's own extensions manager won't let you, including a Forced Uninstall option which bypasses Joomla entirely and can even remove ghost extension database entries.
Onthos' primary use case is allowing power users and professional site maintainers perform deep cleanup of leftover extensions which accumulate over time on your site. In the past, this kind of deep cleaning involved arcane knowledge of the internal workings of Joomla, direct manipulation of the database, and even writing custom code. Not anymore!
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.
Onthos - Clean up the muck on your Joomla! site
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/.
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.