Disable the “Help” Menu in Joomla 2.5 and 3

A default installation of Joomla comes with a “Help” menu. It holds links to important Joomla resources, sure. But they can also be an unneccesary distraction for the users. What if you don’t want them to wander into the Joomla Jungle alone?

Whatever your reason might be, you’ll be glad to hear that this Help section can be disabled in the Help section. I was originally going to say “can be customized in” but that’s not really the case.

How to disable the help section

The Admin Menu is a module, so it can be customized in the Module Manager. Here’s how you disable the help section: (Note: While the screenshots are from Joomla 3.x the steps are the same in Joomla 2.5)

Open the Module Manager, under “Extensions.

In the Module Manager, first change the filter to show “Administrator” Modules instead of Site Modules. With that done, look for “Admin Menu”. A search for that exact term should do the trick. Open the Module.

Set the option for “Help Menu” to “Hide” and save the module. In Joomla 3.x you will need to go to the “Options” tab to see this option.

The Help part will now be hidden.

Extra Credit

Remember the beginning of the article, where we mentioned we wouldn’t mention how to Customize the Help section? That was partially true. We’re going to show you what happens if you enter a value for “Custom Support Forum”.

As you can see, the result is you get the joys of the full “Help” Menu, with one difference: A “Custom Support Forum” option has been added. Which, unless your company name is “Custom”, is a pretty bad name for the menu item. So you might be better off just forgetting that option exists and just disable the entire thing if you want to offer “Custom” support options.