Concrete5 makes it easy to streamline the content editing interface with things like custom attributes, page type defaults, areas, and composer. But there's one small piece of the process that has always bugged me because it cannot be easily changed: the display order of page type icons when adding new pages.

The page type icons are always displayed in alphabetical order, but this does not always make sense -- for example, if you have one page type for the "Home" page, and another page type called "Interior Content" that is for every other page of the site, then the "Home" page type gets listed first -- even though it only exists for one page and will never be used again.

If you turn on advanced permissions, you can hide certain page types from certain users. This is a decent solution if your site is already using advanced permissions for something else. But it would be overkill to enable advanced permissions just for this one feature.

Another solution I've come up with is to simply rename the page types with some special characters (spaces, underscores, asterisks, dashes, etc.) so that you can use the alphabetical order to your advantage.

For example, I always surround the name of my home page type with underscores -- so instead of Home, it's _ Home _.

Now I can shove infrequently-used page type icons to the end of the list, and users don't need to worry about reading through them every time they want to add a new page!

Gotchas

Two gotchas to be aware of:

1. This trick should only be applied to the page type name, not the handle.
2. In Concrete version 5.6.0, the system prevented non-alphanumeric characters in page type names. This has been fixed as of version 5.6.1 (and it worked in all versions prior to 5.6.0).