Richard Castera

Customizing Magento could be difficult. Here is an easy way to display any block in any template file that cannot be loaded with $this->getChildHtml().

<?php echo $this->getLayout()->getBlock('top.search')->toHtml() ?>

If you’ve ever wanted to add new products in your Magento home page, it’s fairly easy to implement. Go to “CMS” then “Manage Pages” and select “Home Page” from the list of pages. Now paste this code snippet to show products labeled as “new” on your front page:

{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage" template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}

(Note that you must have some new products in your catalog for anything to show when you do this. This doesn’t mean that you’ve recently added them; only products explicitly marked as new using “Set Product as New from Date” and “Set Product as New to Date” options in the “General” product information page in the admin tool will be shown.)

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"