Module Title Is Not Showing on Joomla: How to Fix

A new client emailed us this morning and told us that the titles of modules assigned to a certain position are not showing. He told us he was using the latest version of Joomla, and that he ensured that “Show Title” was set to “Show” in the module’s settings. He told us that he’s confident that it was not a caching problem, since he was not using any type of caching and all of his other changes were showing immediately… “What could it be?”, he desperately asked us…

Luckily, we have seen this problem many times before… The problem is neither caused by caching nor by the module itself – the problem is caused by the template. Let us explain…

When you want to create a new module position on your website, you add something like the following code to your template’s index.php:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="module-position" type="xhtml" />

The above ensures that any enabled module assigned to module-position will be displayed on the pages it is assigned to. Additionally, the above ensures that the styling of the module is set to xhtml, which means (among other things), that the module’s title will be displayed.

However, if you add something like the below to your template’s index.php…

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="module-position"/>

…then the default styling will be used for the modules assigned to module-position, and that default styling is none (note that Joomla’s official documentation erroneously states that the default styling is table – this is wrong – the default styling is none). The none default styling means that the title will not be displayed, and no preset styling will be applied to the module.

As you may have probably guessed when reading this post, our client used something like the latter line in his template, and that’s why the module title was not showing. Adding type=”xhtml” to the module declaration in the template fixed the problem…

If you have the same problem on your Joomla website, then make sure you add type=”xhtml” in the module’s declaration in your template (or make sure you replace type=”none” with type=”xhtml”). Once you do that, clear your Joomla cache and see if it works. If it doesn’t, then please contact us. We will help you fix the problem in no time and for a very affordable fee.