Can somebody give me an eagle eye perspective on Magento blocks, layout and templates? - magento

Question

Can somebody give me an eagle eye perspective on Magento blocks, layout and templates and how they relate to each other?
I understood that blocks are the basic building-blocks that a page is made of and that they are kind of mini-controllers.
I also understood that layout brings these blocks somehow together.
But there is still some uncertainty about templates and how they relate to blocks and layouts and vice versa.

Answer 1

What are blocks?
There are basically 4 things you need to know:
There are two types of blocks: those that automatically render their
children and those that don't. Knowing which type you're using will
help you in debugging.
Magento blocks are essentially models that contain logic for your view templates. Mind you - this is not business logic, but it is logic
related to the display of the information you're presenting. This is
by definition presentational logic. If you're familiar with Zend
Framework's Zend_Layout you could draw a comparison between custom
view objects and layout helpers.
The template file assigned to a block object can execute code as if it is local to that object. That is, $this corresponds directly to
the block class.
Layout actions are a thing that people use.
Two types of blocks
There are two types of blocks at the end of the day - those that
render automatically and those that don't. Take notes because this is
on the Magento Certification exam!!
Auto-rendered blocks
When defined in a layout, any block of type core/text_list will
automatically render all its children. While core/text will
automatically render itself it really only should contain text and
therefore is not useful for layout purposes (though some clever things
can be achieved with them).
Other blocks
Any other block type will need to be rendered manually. Provide the
block an alias which can then be passed to getChildHtml, returning the
content which you then echo.
Layouts And Templates
As the name suggests, layout files are useful in rendering front pages
of Magento. Layout files are XML files that reside in in app > design
frontend > your interface > your theme > layout. Here, you can see that there are many layout files for any given module. Each Magento
module has its own layout files much like the customer module has the
customer.xml layout file, catalog module have catalog.xml layout file
etc. These layout files contain structural blocks and content blocks.
read the following blogs. it will clear your concepts for magneto.
http://alanstorm.com/category/magento
http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/magefordev/mage-for-dev-4.html
http://blog.philwinkle.com/the-most-misunderstood-concept-in-magento/
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/custom-layouts-and-templates-with-magento--cms-21419

Answer 2

Blocks are the building modules of a page. They can be treated as "bricks". Now every block comes inside a layout. Layout is used to define the "shape" of the page. Now templates are used to define the behaviour of a particular block. That means each block or "brick" will have different charateristic depend upon the template it is used.
That is, to construct a magento page, you need to define a layout first that will give you an idea of shape of that page. Now you fill the layout with blocks. Each blocks now concentrate on a particular section of the entire layout. That means depending upon the "nature" of block, each small section will behave differently. To define the unique nature of a particular section, blocks uses templates (templates actually holds the webpage building codes, ie html + js + php)
I hope that will give you a short idea.
Try to google this. I am sure there are lot of lot of tutorials, blogs available about this.