Activity log
A record of every change made through the file manager — who, what, where and when.
Opening it
Components → Next File Manager → Activity Log.
The tab is visible to Super Users only. It is not exposed to profiled users, and there is no profile toggle that reveals it — a user who can be audited should not be able to read the audit.
What is recorded
Every operation that changes something:
| Group | Operations |
|---|---|
| Content | Upload, delete, edit (file write) |
| Naming | Rename, duplicate |
| Placement | Copy, move (cut/paste), including cross-drive transfers |
| Archives | Create ZIP, extract |
| Protection | Lock, unlock |
Each entry carries:
- User — the acting Joomla user
- Action — which operation
- Place — which place it happened on
- Path — the target, relative to the place
- When — the timestamp
Reads are not logged. Browsing, previewing, searching and downloading do not create entries — logging every listing would bury the mutations you actually want to find, and the log would grow without bound on ordinary use.
Reading it
The viewer is a data grid with search and per-column filtering. The two questions it is built to answer quickly:
"What happened to this file?" — filter by path. You get its whole history: who uploaded it, who renamed it, who last edited it.
"What has this user been doing?" — filter by user. Useful when handing a contributor a new scope, and useful after the fact.
Sort by timestamp to read forwards or backwards.
Storage
Entries live in the component's own table in the Joomla database. They are removed when the component is uninstalled, along with the rest of its tables.
The log has no automatic retention policy in this release — entries accumulate until you remove them. On a busy site with heavy upload traffic this table will grow, so it is worth including in whatever database maintenance you already run.
What it is not
The activity log records what happened through Next File Manager. It cannot see changes made by other means — FTP clients, SSH sessions, other Joomla extensions, or a deployment script. A file that changed without a matching log entry changed outside the file manager.
That is worth stating plainly when the log is being used to answer a "who broke the site" question: its silence is evidence that Next File Manager was not the route, not that nothing happened.