How to turn on the "?tp=1" trick in Joomla 1.7+?

In a previous tip I enumerated couple of methods on how you can make visible the template positions in Joomla 1.7+.

But there seems to be at least two different problems for some users.

First of all, on some installs the trick with adding "?tp=1" to the end of the URL seems to not working. The problem is caused by the fact, that by default, on Joomla 1.6+ this is turned off, so you need to enable it. Remember that you have to be an administrator or super administrator to do this. For this you should go in Joomla's Administrator interface to Top Menu -> Extensions -> Template Manager. Find the Options icon in the upper right corner. Choose Templates tab, and set Preview Module Positions to Enabled. That's all.

The other problem is trickier: on content intensive sites, and/or on some templates those well readable red boxes with the module name in the top left are simply unreadable or not recognizable. You can fix this with two lines of well placed CSS code.

Open the general.css file from /templates/system/css folder. Ad to it these three lines (tweak the colors to have the best contrast on your site):

.mod-preview { background: #fff; border: 1px solid red;padding:2px;}
div.mod-preview-info {background-color: #fff;border: 0;z-index: 999;color: red;}
div.mod-preview-wrapper {display:none; }

The third line is not mandatory, you can leave it out, and see, which is the best combination in your case. With these tweaks now names of the modules should be more readable than the default ones. Be aware, that you are modified a file wich is part of the core of Joomla, so in this regard it's qualifying as a core hack - and when you upgrade Joomla your modifications might be lost. The good news is that the trick works in Joomla 1.5 too!