Move blocks to the left by default

I've had a couple issues with blocks appearing at different sides of the page, depending on the page I'm at. There are a couple options that will set default actions for blocks.


Choose the region that blocks appear on your course page:

1) Navigate to your current theme and open up the config.php file.
theme/mythemename/config.php

2)  Scroll down until you see a line of code that describes "in-course"

'incourse' => array(
'file' => 'general.php',
'regions' => array('side-pre', 'side-post'),
'defaultregion' => 'side-pre',
    ),
This code sets the regions for the blocks within a course page. This applies to pages used by any activities as well.
Side-pre:  left side of the page
Side-post:  right side of the page

Setting the "regions" to include both, means that when moving a block, you can choose either the right or left side.
Setting the "defaultregion"  means all blocks appear on the left side by default.



Decide how many default blocks appear on a course page:
This setting decides which default blocks appear automatically on a course page when it's created for the first time. Some people like myself, don't need 5 blocks spawning each time.

1)  Go to your moodle server and located the course format you are currently using. In my case, I'm using the "Collapsed Topics" format for my courses.
course/format/topcoll

2)  Open the config.php file.
course/format/topcoll/config.php

3)  You should see a line of code that looks like this:
$format['defaultblocks'] = ':...';
Here you can delete or add the blocks you want to automatically appear on all course pages.