Where is Joomla 2.5 plugin information stored?

Joomla 2.5 has reached its end of life as for 12/31/2014. Please be advised this may be a security risk to your website. You can view more information about the end of life here.

Up to this point, we’ve created a basic Joomla 2.5 plugin and added a custom parameter to it. In our effort to provide a thorough tutorial series, before we get back to expanding the plugin, we would like to show you how this plugin’s information is stored.

Plugin data / parameters are stored in your Joomla 2.5 database. Using a MySQL client such as phpMyAdmin, you can easily find where and how plugin data is stored.

 

Where in the database is plugin data written?

plugin-in-database

Plugin data is stored in the _extensions table. If your Joomla 2.5 database prefix is jjdu43 for example, the plugin data will be in the jjdu43_extensions table. To the right is a screenshot of our Hello World plugin in the database:

 

In what fields is the plugin parameter info saved to?

Most of the information is easy to identify within the fields. For example:

name / elementThis is the name of the plugin
folderAs this is a content plugin, it is in the content folder.
enabledThis controls whether or not the plugin is enabled.
manifest_cacheThis holds much of the information that was found in the plugin’s xml file, such as who wrote the plugin and the author’s contact information.
paramsAny custom parameters that you create will be stored in the params field.

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