Joomla Template Tools – Viewing Positions and Other Templates
Have you ever been trying to figure out which position was where on your template? Ever wanted to see your Joomla site using a different template without changing the live template?
You can do both with the handy tools built-in to Joomla, read on to learn how.
Sometimes you need to locate a module by what position is has been assigned to and sometimes you just need to see all the positions available on a template.
Either need can be met by using the built-in template position overlay. This feature does need to be enabled in Joomla by default before it can be used.
- Go to Extensions>Templates
- Click Options in the upper right hand corner
- Select “Enabled” on Preview Module Positions
- Click the Save & Close button
- Now, go to the frontend of your website and add “?tp=1” to the end of your url and you will then see all the positions marked by name and location overlayed on the site
Sometimes you might want to see what your site would look like in a different template without changing your live site to your public audience. This can also be done with a url variable.
Simply go to the frontend of your site and add “?template=” followed by the name of the template you want to see it in, for instance, in our example we are using Beez 3 template, so we add “?template=beez3” after the url.
Please note, if you have modules, you will either need to have the same position names in the new template you are previewing, or you will need to make duplicates of the modules and assign them to the module position names of the new template you are previewing.
We can even combine these two url variables to see both a different template and the areas on that template. Note, you will have to make sure you have enabled the Preview Module Positions like above for this to work.
In our example, we use the Beez 3 template and show it’s module positions by adding “?template=beez3&tp=1” after the url.
We do recommend that after you have checked your module positions you go back and disable the Preview Module Positions in the template options.
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