Magento – Adding a new reference block to Magento

magentomagento-1.7

I'm having some trouble getting a custom Reference block to work in Magento.

These are the steps I have taken:

Step 1

Created a new “Reference” block in page.xml

<block type="core/text_list" name="newreference" as="newreference"></block>

Step 2

Added a reference to this block in the place I want it to appear in the page (above the footer in 1column.phtml, 2columns-left.phtml, 2columns-right.phtml, 3columns.phtml)

<?php $this->getChildHtml('newreference'); ?>

Step 3

Added a reference to catalog.xml which tells Magento I want to output a template part (specialfooter.phtml) in the ‘newreference’ Reference block on Category pages

<reference name="newreference">
     <block type="core/template" name="specialfooter" template="page/html/specialfooter.phtml"></block>
</reference>

Step 4

Created ‘specialfooter.phtml’ in the page/html/ directory with a simple paragraph block to test.

And nothing happens.

The steps I have taken fit with my understanding of how Reference blocks work, but I could be wrong. I'm struggling to find any documentation, official or otherwise, or any previous SO questions which sheds any light on the subject.

I'm using Magento ver. 1.7.0.2.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Best Answer

Don't you have forget a echo ? :

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('newreference'); ?>

Special Objects

There are three types of Objects that Magento considers "special". These are Models, Blocks, and Helpers. Rather than use class names for these objects Magento uses URI-like strings called class aliases . So this

page/html

corresponds to the Block class

Mage_Page_Block_Html

Class here is referring to PHP classes, not CSS classes.

Magento Page Rendering

A Layout Object is responsible for creating all the HTML for a Magento page.

A Layout Object is a collection of nested Block Objects.

Most Block Objects are Template Blocks, that is, the Block class inherits from the base Magento template block Mage_Core_Block_Template. Template Blocks are objects responsible for rendering a phtml template file.

So, when you specify a "type" in the XML Layout files, you're telling Magento.

I want to add a block object with the class foo/bar, using the template baz.phtml

In code, that's

<!-- "name" and "as" are used to identify the block in the layout, so that 
PHP code can get a reference to the object. -->
<block type="foo/bar" name="myname" as="myname" template="path/to/baz.phtml" />

If all you want to do is render a template file, you can use

type="core/template"

However, by using a different value, like

type="page/html"

your phtml template file gets access to all the methods in

Mage_Page_Block_Html

Which means you could do something like

File: template.phtml

<a href="<?php echo $this->getBaseUrl();?>"></a>

The core/template class doesn't have a getBaseUrl method, but the page/html class does.

If you're doing custom module development (as opposed to just theming), I usually create a Block Object in my own module that extends one of the base Magento blocks. This allows me to add my own methods to the block as I see fit. If you're only theming, page/html is a decent default.

Sql – Is it bad practice to ‘go backwards’ with a foreign key

This is perfectly fine. Your table designed as laid out, establishes that one file_table record can be associated with 0 or more extra_data records. However, one extra_data record can only be associated to one file_table record.

What do you mean by going backwards?

Best Answer

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