How to change a specific text in this Joomla extension?

Most extensions in Joomla, use the following three ways to allow for translation or text customization:

1. Item Fields
2. Text Options
3. Language .ini files

A. Item Fields

Many components have custom items. Those are usually managed by Components > Custom Component Name > Item Manager. For example: Components > SimpleQuiz > Quizzes. This is called a back-end (or administrator) view.

Each item may have item specific text fields. To edit those, you need to edit each specific item. If you cannot find a text you need to edit inside a specific item, you need to look for the Text Options.

B. Text Options

There are various places that a text option may be found. This is often relative to the use of each specific text. For example, a "Read More" button text would make more sense to be global (or placed in language ini files) rather than being menu-item specific. On the other hand, it would be necessary to have specific text options for each instance of a module that has many modes or a menu item's Pre-Text.

There are 4 places to look for a Text Option in Joomla:

1. Component Options
2. Menu Item Options
3. Module Options
4. Plugin Options

1. Component Options

 Each Component may have its own options. Those can usually be found by going to any administrator view of that component and looking for the button "Options".

If you cannot find it that way, there may be a "Configuration" menu on the left. However, that is non standard in Joomla, and Mavrosxristoforos.com extension do not include options that way. Another way to find Component Options, is by going to System > Global Configuration and looking for the desired component on the left menu.

2. Menu Item Options

More specific options can be found in the menu item options. Each front-end view in Joomla should be related to a menu item. You can usually find many options in such menu items:

3. Module Options

Modules are small, useful parts of a Joomla website. Each module type may have multiple module instances that appear on different menu items or do different things depending on their options. Sometimes, it makes more sense to include a text option in the module, so that it may change according to menu item, language, etc.

Those options are found when editing a module in the Module manager (from Extensions > Modules):

4. Plugin Options

A last place in which you can look for Text Options is in a plugin. Usually plugin-only extensions have such options here. A better way to implement text options is to use the language .ini files.

C. Language .ini files

Joomla has implemented a translation system based on text files with .ini file extension, that include strings in the following format:

TEXT_IN_CAPITALS_NO_SPACES="Translation in both capitals and lowercase letters"

To edit such a file, you need to find it in the language directory of your site files. The language directory contains subdirectories with each installed language. For example: en-GB, de-DE, fr-FR, nl-NL, es-ES, it-IT, el-GR or similar. Each xx-XX directory contains files with the following title format xx-XX.extension_name.ini.

This way, you can easily find the file you need to edit to change a text of an extension that you cannot find in any of the previous text options. For example, if you want to edit the English text of all MyShortlist modules, you need to go to language/en-GB/en-GB.mod_myshortlist.ini.

This is a global way of changing a text for each language. You cannot have more than one variation of a text, so this method is not useful for Pre-Texts or Item specific texts. For more information on how to edit a language .ini file, please read on here.

In newer Joomla versions, you can skip the file editing process by creating a Language override.

More Information

More translation related information for Joomla:

Creating a language definition file

Specification of language files