creating a basic "hello world" to appear in Magento page header - magento

Question

I'm just ramping up with Magento and somethings that appear rather intuitive on the surface, don't seem to be working as expected. Here is a very basic template example that I am trying to get working at a "hello world" level before digging deeper.
In the "header" block definition in my page.xml layout I have the following block included:
<block type="core/text_list" name="helloRob" as="helloRob" template="page/html/hellorob.phtml" />
Then, in my header.phtml file, I have added...
<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('helloRob'); ?>
The contents of the hellorob.phtml file are:
<h1>Hello Rob</h1>
Yet, when displaying the page, I don't get the expected H1 element output in the header. If I remove the "getChildHtml" call and replace it with the actual HTML, then it displays the H1. So I know that my custom header.phtml file is getting loaded. I've also been able to confirm that I am adding my block to the correct layout XML file, because when I comment out another block in the same file, the commented out block no longer appears on my page.
I've checked over the code looking for something obvious, like a typo. I've also checked for any naming conflicts -- hence "helloRob" rather than "helloWorld".
I feel like I am missing something incredibly obvious, like looking for your glasses only to find them on top of your head.
Any help -- with the code -- not my glasses -- would be appreciated!
--Rob

Answer 1

The problem here is your understanding of block types. Blocks in Magento do different things, the one you've used here core/text_list serves a specific purpose. You can view what a block does by looking at it's code Block file, core/text_list is located in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Text/List.php
protected function _toHtml()
{
$this->setText('');
foreach ($this->getSortedChildren() as $name) {
$block = $this->getLayout()->getBlock($name);
if (!$block) {
Mage::throwException(Mage::helper('core')->__('Invalid block: %s', $name));
}
$this->addText($block->toHtml());
}
return parent::_toHtml();
}
As you can see it's purpose is to just print out child blocks. This block type is used for text menus' and as blocks purely as containers for other blocks.
As you are looking for a block to just print the contents of a template so type="core/template" will do just fine, it's _toHtml() method is
protected function _toHtml()
{
if (!$this->getTemplate()) {
return '';
}
$html = $this->renderView();
return $html;
}