How to Hide a Module in Articles but Show It in the Parent Category

Joomla is a very powerful CMS (much more powerful than WordPress, in our humble opinion), but there are some basic things that cannot be done easily. For example, one of our clients told us that they wanted to display a few modules only on the category blog page, but not on the child categories. They had a category called Vacations, and articles such as Amsterdam, London, Paris, etc… and they only wanted to display a few modules on the Vacations category blog page, but not on the Paris page.

Those who have been using Joomla for a long time know how modules are displayed on a page: they are assigned to a Menu Item Id, and they are displayed only for that Menu Item Id. In a default installation of Joomla and for articles who don’t have unique Menu Items, the Menu Item Id of those articles is the same as the parent category, which means that the modules appearing on the parent category will also display on those articles.

But, if what if you don’t want to display those modules on child articles?

Unfortunately, there’s no way from within Joomla to do this. However, you can do this by making adjustments to your template. Here’s how:

• You create module positions in the template that should show up only on the category page.

• You add a condition, in the template, to display these modules on category pages, and not on article pages.

Here’s how to do this technically:

• Open the file index.php located under the templates/[template-name] folder on your Joomla website.

• In the desired location, add the following code:

  <?php if (JRequest::getVar( 'view' ) != 'article') : ?>
<jdoc:include type="modules" name="[module-position-name]" />
<?php endif; ?>

• Upload the index.php back to the templates/[template-name] folder.

• Assign your modules to the [module-position-name].

• Browse your website and you will notice that these modules will not appear on article pages, just category pages.

Is there another way for doing this?

If you’re using a basic Joomla instance, then no, there isn’t any other way. However, if you’re using sh404SEF, then there are other ways to do this, but not as clean or stable (basically you will need to modify the ItemID in the category/article URLs. Works but not a great idea and not something that we recommend).

If you want to do the above but you lack the technical skills, then all you need to do is to contact us. We can do this for you in no time, we will not charge you much, and we are really, really friendly!