Hello Arno,
while auditing a long-running Joomla site (migrated from Joomla 2.5 through to 5.4, jDownloads installed and updated throughout), I came across leftovers related to the obsolete jDownloads search plugin for the old Joomla search component (com_search, removed from core in Joomla 4):
The plugin folder plugins/search/jdownloads/ no longer exists (correct, since the plugin is obsolete).
However, its language files were still present in administrator/language/de-DE/: de-DE.plg_search_jdownloads.ini and de-DE.plg_search_jdownloads.sys.ini. They were never removed by any jDownloads update, and with the plugin gone they are orphaned files.
Request 1: Could a future jDownloads update script remove these orphaned plg_search_jdownloads language files (all language variants), so that long-migrated sites get cleaned up automatically?
Two smaller, related observations from the same audit:
The current jDownloads still installs its language files into the global language folders using the legacy language-prefix naming scheme (e.g. administrator/language/de-DE/de-DE.com_jdownloads.ini). This format has been deprecated since Joomla 4 and support for it is announced to be removed in Joomla 6 — only the prefix-less format (com_jdownloads.ini) or per-extension language/ folders will be loaded then. It would be great to see jDownloads switch to the new naming before Joomla 6 lands.
The update process appears to leave *.ini.old backup copies behind (e.g. de-DE.com_jdownloads.ini.old in both language/de-DE/ and administrator/language/de-DE/). These are never loaded by Joomla and could be removed by the update script as well.
Environment: Joomla 5.4, PHP 8.x, current jDownloads 4.x.
Thanks a lot for maintaining jDownloads all these years!