Magento – Change Default Value of ‘Position’ Category Attribute

A way to do it is to add an attribute like Position.

Then set position to say 1.

Then you can run the script getting the attribute value to whatever categoryId you want

Something like this might help.

Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage::getModel('core/store')->load(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID));
$categoryId = '3'; //replace with your category id
$newPosition = 'getattribute position'; //replace with your new position
$category =    Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->setStoreId(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID)->load($categoryId);
$products = $category->getProductsPosition();
foreach ($products as $id=>$value){
    $products[$id] = $newPosition;
}
$category->setPostedProducts($products);
$category->save();

This can be a way if you set the script on cron to update automatically, ofcourse the script will need to modify.

I think you could either do it for each category or you could do it here as seen in the screenshot below

UPDATE Otherwise try this

In the toolbar block there is a method called disableParamsMemorizing. This should disable the storing of parameters in session. Try to add this in the toolbar block.

<action method="disableParamsMemorizing" />

or you can override the Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List class and make the getToolbarBlock method look like this:

public function getToolbarBlock()
{
    if ($blockName = $this->getToolbarBlockName()) {
        if ($block = $this->getLayout()->getBlock($blockName)) {
            $block->disableParamsMemorizing();
            return $block;
        }
    }
    $block = $this->getLayout()->createBlock($this->_defaultToolbarBlock, microtime());
    $block->disableParamsMemorizing();
    return $block;
}