Disable unnecessary components in the Joomla admin

There is nothing like a bunch of links that users don't need. Lets say you don't want to use the Banners component, wouldn't it be great to just turn it off sitewide? You can, and you just have to know where to look for it. Log into the administrator and go to Install/Uninstall. Go to the Components submenu link, and you'll see all installed components. Hit the checkmark for Banner under Enabled, and it will disable the whole component. Now this only works for components, but it removes the link from the menu.

limit user access to Joomla menu items

Rather than give every user full permission, try to limit their ability by giving them a lower user access level. By default, the levels Manager, Administrator, and Super Admininstrator are available in Joomla 1.5 for back end access. If a user doesn't need to do anything more than edit content, then use the front end (unless using a component that doesn't support it) and give them Author access. Its much better to over limit your users than to give them too much access.

3rd party Joomla admin Permission extensions

There are a few extensions that help you control user permissions beyond the basic settings. Joomla 1.6 will come with a much expanded permissions system by default, but for now you can use one of the several options out there. Look at the extensions directory in Joomla for the options.

Our access control component of choice is the awesome Dioscouri component called JUGA.

While this component has a pretty steep learning curve the power and potential of the component is pretty amazing. You can control a wide range of permissions based on url, item id and create multiple groups for different uses to give varied access to different area of the site. You can also set permissions for access to the admin of your site. The beauty of this component is that it doesnt hack the Joomla core, which makes maintaining Joomla and then updating it a breeze.

Try Crisp's new permission features

We just added the ability to hide specific component menu items from users in the administrator. While this doesn't technically prevent access to the page (if they know the URL, they can still get there if the component is designed to allow their access), it does hide the links. Generally this is good enough from any administrator user who just needs to see what they need. It doesn't override the default Joomla settings though, so if a user level can't see the Configuration for example, Crisp can't override that.

Hopefully these few tricks can help you clean up extra stuff in the Joomla Administrator, and help improve the ability for users to use it.

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