rearrange product blocks - magento

Question

I have 3 questions that my normal Googling efforts haven't answered. I'm a in-house front end web developer that has been trying to learn Magento for the past two weeks. I'm also new to posting on Stack Overflow, so let me know if these would be better posted as separate questions or something.
1. Layouts - Making it so every single page uses the same layout
So most of my pages are using my 2columns-left layout, but not all of them. I have some set in my local.xml, and some I just hard coded in the .phtml pages directly. I would have thought the following code would make ALL pages use the same layout:
<reference name="root">
<action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-left.phtml</template></action>
<action method="setIsHandle">
<applied>1</applied>
</action>
</reference>
There are a lot of pages I don't normally see when I work on the site that are stuck with the default Magento layouts, like the /cookies-enabled page, or the review pages. What's the best practice for unifying all pages if you want the same layout on the entire site, rather than having a block like this in local.xml for every single page?
2. Contact Us Form - Clicking the submit button doesn't work
I am editing the contact us page under CMS>Pages, and I think I am possibly missing the file that my form action is pointing to. The form shows up, but it doesn't submit.
Here is what I have on our Contact Us CMS page:
{{block type='core/template' name='contactForm' form_action="/contacts/index/post/" template='contacts/form.phtml'}}
Here's the error I get after clicking the submit button:
Not Found
The requested URL /contacts/index/post/ was not found on this server.
I've gone through the configuration settings and I think those are right, but maybe there is something else I have to do there.
3. Product Reviews - Getting an "Overall" rating to display
I have the review div that utilizes form.phtml showing up on my product pages after you login and add a review, but the ratings aren't being shown. I am apparently not satisfying the conditions of an if statement that controls if the ratings should be displayed. Below is the if statement that it is getting caught on I believe:
<?php if( $this->getRatings() && $this->getRatings()->getSize()): ?>
I'm not sure how to satisfy these conditions.
4. Rearranging Blocks - Using local.xml to rearrange where blocks are going
Before I start developing bad habits, I want to make sure I'm using best practices from the get go. I've typically just gone into the template files and manually move where stuff was appearing in the phtml, but I've heard it's best to make those changes in the XML. One particular issue I can't seem to figure out is a seemingly simple one: How do I make the "Proceed to Checkout" button move to the bottom of the cart?
I'm trying to unset it then re-set it after the other blocks. I haven't even been able to get the unsetChild part to work. Here is my code from local.xml:
<reference name="content">
<action method="unsetChild">
<name>checkout.cart.top_methods</name>
</action>
</reference>
I think the reason this isn't working is because in checkout.xml it's the child of a child. Here's the general flow of the checkout.xml:
<checkout_cart_index>
<reference name="content">
<block name="checkout.cart">
**<block name="checkout.cart.top_methods">**
Any ideas? Thanks so much, and sorry about the length of this post!

Answer 1

1°) Edit all your layout xml to change the layout of the root reference to 2columns-leftf.phtml template
You can also go through an observer. Observe the controller_action_layout_generate_blocks_after event and in your method do :
public function myEventHandling($event) {
$event->getAction()->getLayout()->getBlock('root')->setTemplate('page/2columns-left.phtml');
}
2°) module Contacts controller index action postAction() so it should be /contacts/index/post/ so it should work. Except if you made your CMS page replacing /contacts/ normal behaviour (module contacts controller index action indexAction() ) it will search under your cms page instead of in the contacts module. If your CMS page have contacts as url, try changing it.
3°) Could you be more precise ? I don't really understand what you need. The form or the existing ratings are not showing up ?
4°) UnsetChild or remove instruction are global, you have to set it with a different name after a replace. But you can edit your layout file in your template directory (not the ones on the base/default/layout directory) to move the block in the proper location, and in the phtml file, try to move the
echo $this->getChildHtml('myblock')
in the proper location.