Proper Way to Remove madisonisland.css in Magento 1.9

ce-1.9.0.1rwd-theme

The new Madison Island theme for Magento CE 1.9/EE 1.14 comes with several theme specific CSS files, madisonisland.css and madisonisland-ie8.css.

According to the Magento documentation (http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ee114-ce19-rwd-dev-guide#remove-sample-content ) the way to do this would be via local.xml with the following code:

<layout version="0.1.0">
<default>
    <reference name="head">
        <action method="removeItem"><type>skin_css</type><name>css/madisonisland.css</name></action>
        <action method="removeItem"><type>skin_css</type><name>css/madisonisland-ie8.css</name></action>
    </reference>
</default>
</layout>

However, when testing this it does not remove the two CSS files as they both still load on the frontend (and yes of course the caches have been cleared). I assume that the reason they are not removed is because they are coded into head.phtml.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('css/madisonisland.css'); ?>" media="all" />

Instead of being loaded via: <?php echo $this->getCssJsHtml() ?>
Is that correct?

Of course they can be easily removed by copying head.phtml to custom_package/custom_theme/template/page/html/ and removing those lines from the template file itself but is this the best method or should there be an alternative XML way to do this?

Best Answer

I checked version 1.9.0.1 and those files are being added by XML, so your first method should work.

If, however, you somehow have a version where the link tags are indeed coded into head.phtml then it is entirely valid to override it in your custom theme and edit manually. The only other method I can think of would be to create a replacement template file and then apply it with some XML.

<layout>
    <default>
        <reference name="head">
            <action method="setTemplate"><template>your/new/head.phtml</template></action>
        </reference>
    </default>
</layout>

But that only achieves the same result as overriding head.phtml directly only with more effort, so there is no point.

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