Managing Joomla Extensions

Extensions in Joomla 2.5 and the previous versions 1.7 and 1.6 are managed from the Administrator panel, the Extensions button in the top menu. There you find a page with the following tabs:

 Install, Update, Manage, Discover and check Warning in Joomla Extension Manager

 As you can see each tab has its purpose. Some tabs are self-explanatory, like Install for example. Others, however, like Warnings, are not. Let’s go briefly through each of them and check their options:

1. Install - this tab offers you 3 ways to install a new extension - upload a file, use a file already uploaded to your site or directly download an extension from an URL. The latter is new for Joomla and would allow faster and easier extensions installation. However, it may not work on all servers.
2. Update  - this is another new feature which will allow you to update Joomla and its extensions directly from the admin panel. This is similar to Wordpress update functionality and the cornerstone for stable and secure installation.

Since this feature is very new you are strongly advised to be very careful using it and to always create backups beforehand. It may severely damage your Joomla and wipe out all its files.

3. Manage - in this tab you can enable, disable and most importantly uninstall extensions. It is important to know that this is the only place in the admin area which will allow you to uninstall an extension and this may confuse users of previous Joomla versions.
4. Discover - this is another new function which can detect incomplete Joomla extensions installations. For example, if Discover finds files for mod_example extension in modules/ it will show the installation as incomplete and give you the option to complete it.
5. Warnings - this screen will show you errors related to your extensions and their installation. These errors could be anything from missing files to incompatibility with other extensions or the core Joomla installation.