Richard Castera

Magento has lots of blocks that display in the left and right columns (based on your layout). Changing the order in which they are displayed or sorted is easy. Navigate to the folder "app\design\frontend\default\YOUR_THEME\layout". In this folder, there are several XML files which are called Layouts.

Magento Layouts are the tools with which you can assign content blocks to each structural block you create. Layout exists in the form of XML text-file and by modifying the layout you are able to move blocks around in a page and assign templates to the content blocks to produce markup for the structural blocks.

To change the order, find a block you want to change. So if I wanted to display the products compared side box first in my left column, I would do by adding before="-" as an attirbute to it's xml node. Now, save it and upload. That's it!

<reference name="left">
    <block type="core/template" before="-" name="catalog.compare.sidebar" template="catalog/product/compare/sidebar.phtml"/>
</reference>

Here some other ways to order blocks.

To display as the First block:

before="-"

To display as the last block:

after="-"

To display before any other block:

before="block_name"

To display after any other block:

after="block_name"