You have an error in your xml, the <layout>
tag at the end should be closed, but I will assume that it's a copy/paste mistake and that is not the problem
Your problem is here:
<default>
<reference name="root">
<block type="core/template" name="page_head" output="toHtml" template="page/html/head.phtml" />
<action method="addCss"><stylesheet>css/normalize.css</stylesheet></action>
</reference>
</default>
What you are doing is:
- Referencing the root block in all pages, adding to it a block of type
core/template
that is using the page/html/head.phtml
as its template.
- Calling the
addCss
method of the page/html
block (since the root is of that type if you look in the page.xml
layout file)
What you should be doing is referencing the head
block as the addCss
function is in that one.
Now before answering your main question, I would like to put out a few remarks:
-
It is my understanding from reading the tutorials that Magento will load the default handle and apply to all the pages in this .xml file.
This is somewhat true, except that anything in the
<default>
handle, will applied website-wide, not just for pages of that particular layout file.
-
which class is used to load action method="addCss"? (I have looked in various Mage/Core/Block folders)
If you look at the
page.xml
file, you can find it. In fact there are 2 methods to add CSS files,
addCss
and
addItem
<block type="page/html_head" name="head" as="head">
<action method="addCss"><stylesheet>css/styles.css</stylesheet></action>
<action method="addItem"><type>skin_css</type><name>css/styles-ie.css</name><params/><if>lt IE 8</if></action>
<!-- etc. -->
</block>
From the type of the block, page/html_head
, you would be able to figure out that the block is Mage_Page_Block_Html_Head
. (It's in the format of module/path
)
-
how do I set up the .xml file to add css to the pages in my module?
Since you need the css to be ONLY in you module's pages, you cannot put it in the
<default>
handle. As it would be loaded in all pages throughout the website.
But what you can do, is create your own "default" handle, and make all other handles "extend" it.
So using all that info, this is how your XML would look like:tl;dr
<layout>
<!-- First we create the default handle that should be applied to all
of the module pages in this layout file-->
<user_register>
<reference name="head">
<!-- There is no need to reference the root handle, we just
reference the head handle and call the addCss method -->
<action method="addCss"><stylesheet>css/normalize.css</stylesheet></action>
</reference>
</user_register>
<!-- The next handle will match the BASE_URL/user/register/form path -->
<user_register_form>
<!-- This is the tag which "extends" the user_register handle-->
<update handle="user_register"/>
<block type="core/template" name="prefcentre_regform" output="toHtml" template="ps/prefcentre/signup.phtml" />
</user_register_form>
</layout>
-
where do I need to locate my css for magento to find them?
Since you used
css/normalize.css
as the path for the CSS file, it should be located at
frontend/default/default/css
and not inside a subfolder.
On Ubuntu 16.04, using apache2 I was also facing the same issue.
Activated the mod_rewrite module with
sudo a2enmod rewrite
and restarted the apache with
sudo service apache2 restart
My issue resolved.
Best Answer
Check your DB. There is a table called
theme
that stores a reference to all the themes that have ever been installed in your store. If thetype
of the theme is set to 1, that means Magento sees the theme are virtual (what ever that means) and will no longer load your xml files. If that is the case, just change it to 0. I don't know the why of this issue, but it has tripped me up a few time.