If you've worked with Joomla much, you have noticed that the content manager sorts the articles by section, then by category, then by date.

Or, perhaps you didn't notice!

Anyway, while that is fine for many situations, it is terrible for other situations.

In those cases, you probably want the articles to be sorted by date, with the most recent article at the top of the list. 

Well, you can do this easily with a one line change in the Joomla source code.

Be sure to make a backup copy of the file before you change it in case something goes wrong!

 

The file that you want to edit is: administrator/components/com_content/admin.content.php

Look down around line 150 and you will see the following code:

$order = "\n ORDER BY s.title, c.catid, cc.ordering, cc.title, c.ordering";

This is the line that determines the sort order for the items in the content manager.

Let's change that line so that it says this:

$order = "\n ORDER BY ORDER BY c.created DESC";

Save the file and upload it back to your server, and you are done!  It's a very simple code change that you might find helpful.