Welcome to 4Command!

4Command is a tool that helps you perform many Joomla administrative tasks faster and more easily than what you would normally achieve using Joomla own administrative interface.

By administrative tasks, we mean anything that a website administrator does on a regular Joomla website. This means accessing and using any and all of Joomla admin pages.

Creating or editing articles or categories, installing or updating extensions, creating or configuring modules, menu items, custom fields and groups, plugins, templates, permissions (ACL),... are all administrative tasks 4command can help with.

For that, it relies on 3 elements:

• a command palette
• a number of keyboard shortcuts
• predefined actions such as clearing the cache, emptying trash or checking-in content

Here is an example of 4Command command palette opened:

This makes administering Joomla with 4Command:

• faster because any of the numerous Joomla admin pages can be found and accessed in seconds. Typing a few letters is going to be faster than clicking a series of menu items in most cases
• easier because the command palette lets you search through Joomla features and access them without having to remember them, or how to access them

It's also an accessibility improvement for those Joomla users who do not use a mouse: Joomla can already be used entirely with a keyboard, but 4Command makes navigating that way faster and more convenient.

4Command brings instant navigation to Joomla

The command palette lists, among other things, all known pages on your Joomla administration:

• everything linked from menu - including pages from 3rd-party extensions
• other pages that don't have a direct menu link

With that you can access pages such as Joomla Global configuration by:

• opening 4Command dialog (Ctrl + Alt + X / control + command + X)
• typing config or just conf
• pressing Enter

or the extensions update page with:

• opening 4Command dialog
• typing update extensions or just ext up
• pressing Enter

As you type, the list of possible options is updated in real-time, so you do not have to guess or remember anything.

Tip

For these 2 pages, you don't even need to open 4Command or type anything: they have pre-defined shortcuts!

• Press Ctrl + Alt + G / control + command + G to access the Joomla Global configuration
• Press Ctrl + Alt + E / control + command + K to access the Extensions update page

4Command comes with more than 15 such shortcuts, and soon you'll be able to define your own.

4Command brings instant content search to Joomla

At any time, from any page, start your prompt with ? and 4Command enters Instant Search mode.

What you type from there is used to perform a live search on all your articles and categories title

Highlight: configuring modules and plugins

A shining example of the ease and speed 4Command brings to Joomla admin is how you can now access any module and any plugin in seconds.

Any Joomla website comes by default with about 200 plugins for instance. And many sites use modules extensively to customize their display or features. However, publishing/configuring any of these can be tedious and slow if you first have to search through a list with hundreds of entries.

4Command adds a direct link to configure, enable or disable every module, plugin and template found on your site.

Want to add unpublish your Login menu module? move it to another position? type mod login and press Enter:

And the same with plugins: want to configure your Captcha plugin? hit plug captcha and press Enter: you're there already.

In this last example, typing edit cassio offers 2 links to directly edit either the Cassiopea template or one child template:

In addition to editing them, 4Command also creates a Enable and Disable entry for each module and plugin.

This means you can, for instance, disable the System cache plugin by typing system cache off and pressing Enter

4Command comes with one-click common features

Using the command palette and your keyboard, you can already make your life easier in a number of day-to-day use cases. But 4Command also helps you by providing a series of one-click or one-shortcut actions that would otherwise require a number of steps.

Here are few examples - there are more!:

• Delete all cache - default shortcut Ctrl + Alt + C / control + command + C
• Check-in all content
• Select TinyMCE, CodeMirror, JCE or no editor
• Delete all trashed items
• Delete trashed items of some type
• Resend account activation email

Please find a full list of currently available actions on the 4command actions page.

All the actions in the list above can be run with one click but also sometimes with just a key press combination!

All shortcuts are always available on the 4Command component dashboard and on the 4Command dialog, by clicking the small keyboard icon.

Toolbars quick access

4Command lets you use keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process of creating and editing all kinds of content. This is done by adding known shortcuts to your Joomla toolbars.

Wherever there's a toolbar with standard Joomla buttons, 4Command transparently adds shortcuts so that you can go faster. Here is the list:

On Edit pages

• Ctrl + S / command + S to Save
• Alt + Shift + S / control + shift + S to Save and Close
• Alt + Shift + N / control + shift + N to Save and New
• Alt + Shift + C / control + shift + S to Save and Copy
• Alt + Shift + X / control + shift + X to Close

On List pages

• Alt + Shift + N / control + shift + N to create a New Item
• Alt + Shift + F / control + shift + S to focus the Search input field and start searching without touching the mouse
• Alt + Shift + P / control + shift + P to Publish selected items
• Alt + Shift + U / control + shift + U to Unpublish selected items

Auto-configuration

4Command lists all available pages and features it can find on your site automatically. It essentially does not have any configuration, aside from letting you pick the main keyboad shortcut to open its command palette.

On the Configuration | General page, you can also disable some keyboard shortcuts groups in case there's a conflict with existing shortcuts on your browser or computer.