Joomla 1.5 – Change Article Parameter Defaults

When working with Joomla articles there are a set of advanced features which can be used to define additional options of what you want to be displayed along with your article. Some of the brilliant options include showing or hiding the title, including the author name, showing created or modified date etc.

All of these options can be controlled centrally from the ‘Global configuration’ but unfortunately for some these global settings don’t always transfer into the defaults for when you create new documents … but there is a simple modification to an XML file that can correct this!

 

Please note, you might need to reapply this modification after a Joomla update.

This modification requires a very simple change to one of the Joomla XML files, therefore you will need access to the files on the server (through cPanel, web disk, FTP etc).

In this example we’ll need to modify a configurational file, this will force the ‘Article Rating’ to be set as ‘Show’, rather than relying on the Global Configuration.

  1. Browse to the following folder \administrator\components\com_content\models
  2. Find article.xml
  3. Copy the file to your local computer
  4. Open the copied config.xml with your preferred editor (notepad, Dreamweaver etc)
  5. Navigate to line 52
    param name="show_vote" type="list" default="" label="Item Rating" description="PARAMRATING">
  6. Change the default=”” to default=”1″
    param name="show_vote" type="list" default="1" label="Item Rating" description="PARAMRATING">
  7. Back on the servers directory, back up the original file and place the modified file in its place.

Now for each NEW article you create it will always have the default as defined by you.