Skip to main content
Version: 4.x

system-install

Extensions​

The System / Install / Extensions form is fairly well documented in the Help screen. What is not so obvious is that each of the install methods is a plugin. In early editions of Joomla 4 the Install from Web plugin was first in the list and it is possible that is still the case in versions that have been updated. Having that method first is inconvenient if you usually use one of the other methods because it takes a few seconds to fetch data from the Joomla Extensions Directory site.

To change the order:

  • Go to Home Dashboard / Plugins
  • Select installer from the Select Type drop-down filter.
  • Select the Sort Order icon to reveal the sorting grab handles (vertical ellipsis).
  • Drag the Installer - Install from Web item to the bottom of the list.
  • Go back to System / Install / Extensions to view the result.

Discover​

As described in the Help screen, the Discover function allows you to install extensions that are too big for some systems, especially low-cost shared hosting environments. Something that may not be obvious is that you may have to create folders in different places on your hosting service, typically:

  • Upload site files to siteroot/components/com_mybigcomponent
  • Upload administrator files to siteroot/administrator/components/com_mybigcomponent
  • Upload media (css and javascript) to siteroot/media/com_mybigcomponent
  • Upload site language files to siteroot/language/en-GB if they are not in a language folder in the component site folder.
  • Upload administrator language files to siteroot/administrator/language/en-GB if they are not in a language folder in the component administrator folder.

With that done, Discover should find and allow installation of the component and it might actually work.

Languages​

The default language is English GB. It cannot be removed or installed. It may not be obvious but every page loads appropriate en-GB strings first to ensure that language keys used by coders do not appear in the page output. If the user selected language is not English then the user language is loaded, overwriting the English strings. If a language has not been fully translated the result will be a mixture of user language and English strings. This may look strange but it is better than a mixture of user language and coder keys.