A better way to set module positions in Joomla

Written by Jeremy Wilken 9 Sep2011

Today I found myself wanting to change the default behavior of Joomla 1.7, and the only way to do that was to hack the core. However a creative solution came to light, and a new plugin was born to take control of this seemingly basic, but very annoying functionality in the Joomla administrator.

Setting a module position...is difficult

I have found the Joomla module position selection process to be very cumbersome. In Joomla 1.5, you simply typed the name of the module into a box, or used the dropdown box to select a position that was already available in the template or in use. This wasn't perfect, but Joomla 1.7 came and made the interface far more complex.

In Joomla 1.7, you get the box you can type a name into, or you can click a button and a new window appears with a big list. I'm slightly put off that this has to be done in a modal window, because it adds to the number of clicks necessary to set the position. However the worst part is that the list that appears is very complicated to understand. Besides just showing the names of the positions, it shows if they are part of a template (or multiple templates!), has several filtering options, its paginated so you can see only 20 (or the list limit you've set) at once, and if regardless if you install the demo content or not a lot of unused positions are populated to make this list quite long.

Taking control of this issue

I wrote a simple plugin to address this problem, and it does two things. First, it allows you to set a few filter preferences. This means you can force the default filters to automatically only show your default template, or only show module positions that are specified in a template. Secondly, it adds the dropdown box that I miss from 1.5 to the side, so you can quickly access a list of the module positions already in use (it only populates the positions you've already assigned a module to, generally more useful IMO).

As you can see in the image above, you still can open the modal window, and you can also still reset the filters once it is open, but this way your favorites are right at your tips instead of having to click so many times. You can get the plugin in our resource section, Gnome Module Position Default plugin.