I've inherited a Magento shop site, and the previous developer has gone AWOL. So I'm left with a sheet of paper essentially telling me how to do basic things such as changing the banner on the home page. That's pretty much it.
The person who owns the page now wants to change an advert that's held on the right hand side on the product pages. I've searched in the Admin panel under CMS and drawn a blank. I've navigated through the template files and I've found the 3 column HTML file that I thought contains the actual advert.
It doesn't. Instead, it has the following code:
<div class="col-right sidebar"><?php echo $this->getChildHtml('right') ?></div>
Where can I find the Child HTML? I've searched all of the folders for the file that I'm assuming is called "Right". But I can't seem to find it.
Anyone know where something like this could or would be held?
That is the absolute most root function, anything that is placed in the child "right" will be displayed here and is most certainly not where you want to be doing your editing.
There are literally a hundred different ways content could be posted here and what I would recommend to start with is first determining if it is a static block or a template file.
Go to System -> Configuration -> Developer.
Change "Current Configuration Scope:" to the store you are currently troubleshooting.
Find your IP and place it in "Allowed IPs (comma separated)", this way the next steps will only be visible to you.
Under the "Debug" section you should now see "Template Path Hints" enable this and reload the page.
If that block now has something like: "app/design/base/default/catalog/product/view.phtml" you know it is in a phtml file and you can go there. If it doesn't:
It could be a banner, go to CMS -> Banners and check there.
It could be a static block, go to CMS -> Static Blocks
It could be...any number of things.
You stated that it is on the product page, next step is check catalog.xml in your layout folders. Search for and see if anything inside of there makes sense about what it could be. If the previous developer was any kind of proficient it won't be in catalog.xml but in local.xml OR a custom module's .xml file in the layout directory of the custom theme.
Try doing a search on the code base for the content inside of the block and see if anything pops up. If nothing, use phpmyadmin to search the database for some of the content.
Hope this helps a little.
Search for:
<reference name="right">
Related
I would like to know if there is a way to change text in the code instead of using the admin panel? I have Filezilla installed and can access my site/files from there.
If I use the inspect element in any browser, I can see an HTML structure, but as I have understood there is no HTML document in Magento, right? So where do I go if I want to make a change to a text element on my site and I don't want to use the admin panel?
Most of the text elements are handled by Magento's language translation system.
Quite often, you don't have to mess around hacking templates, just simply add a line to the translation CSV with the text string exactly as it appears, add a comma and then the new text string you want Magento to display.
For example, if you're working with US English, you can use the following file in your own custom template package as follows:
app/design/frontend/default/your_package/locale/en_US/translate.csv
Let's for example, change one of the window shade bar titles in the One Page Shopping Cart. Add a line to translate.csv as follows:
"Billing Information","Billing Address Information"
How this works, in the template the following line normally displays the title:
<?php echo $this->__('Billing Address') ?>
This code snippet $this->__('Billing Address') is a call to Magento's language translation system. It reads the translate.csv file finds Billing Address and changes it to Billing Address Information when it assembles the page html.
Lotta people out there have made changing text like this far harder than it has to be.
Hunting down the proper template, changing the text, finding the template got messed up, or trying to remember after the fact what was changed.
VS.
Changing a simple central file that contains all the text string translations... Often only by adding a new line to the file
Magento actually makes this very simple.
Thank you! So magento stores all text in .csv? or just the stuff that needs to be translated? I'm making a search for .csv via Filezilla but I only get two languages (the site is translated to multiple languages). Should I be looking somewhere else?
there are tutorials on the web about gow to create index.html, css file and template.xml that contain placeholders. ok, i got it, it's simple. but i need a template that has some different views. for example:
-all pages have a topmenu, header, left sidebar, mainarea and a footer but:
-first page has no header .topmenu after which sidebar, mainarea and footer comes.
-second page has sidebar moved from left to right
-third page has four blocks (blocks for special offers) instead of mainarea.
as far as i can see, i need to create three standalone templates with unique set of placeholders for each template. because i can't see the way to change laarge mainarea placeholder with four placeholders for offers blocks on some pages. dynamically.
is there if-statements in joomla templates to simply determine a document id to view four placeholders instead of mainarea. or to not show header on the main page (f.e. doc. id="mainpage")
but i want it to be selectable like:
-this page has first case of that template (index_1.php)
-and that page has a second case of the same template (index_2.php)
like a selectbox.
is that possible?
I will make this an answer as opposed to a comment since I believe it will do what you are looking for.
Once your articles are setup and your links to them are established (the site has the info on it you're looking for), you can create the modules containing the data that you want shown from time to time.
Go to the module manager - on the right you should see 'module assignment' or something along the lines of 'display this module on the following pages'; you can then pick which pages you want the module to show on. You can specify all pages, none, specific pages, however you want.
This will enable you to show them only where needed however you like.
You can ALSO do this programatically inside the module (if you do custom HTML and use an extension like Sourcerer to add PHP to the module) with PHP should you want a little more flexibility, but just choosing the pages to show on should work for what you're doing.
if getChildHtml('product_type_data') ?> maps directly to catalog/product/view/type/simple.phtml by default, how do I map to my own file? If I wanted to create a file that would produce a small image to place on the product page, right under "availability" how would I tell magento to map to where I have put the file? From what I understand getChildHtml('product_type_data') ?> defaults to the file path: catalog/product/view/type/simple.phtml so how can I customize the magento defaults and tell it to map to my custom files i've created?
Could I do something like getChildHtml('etc/etc/my-file.phtml') ?>
Essentially, what I am trying to do is add a small image under "availability" of my site (ex: http://climbhigh.com/climbing/climbing-ropes/petzl-dragonfly-rope-8-2mm.html) that says free shipping. Just trying to find the best way to do it.
I hope I have explained this well enough, if not, please let me know and I will try to explain more. Any help or guidance would be awesome. Thanks.
The code getChildHtml('product_type_data') doesn't always map directly to the template file catalog/product/view/type/simple.phtml. It only maps to that file if the layout handle PRODUCT_TYPE_simple is loaded, i.e. if the current product is a simple product. In order to change the template to be a different one you need to update the template attribute in the layout. At it's most simple this can be achieved by editing app/design/frontend/base/layout/catalog.xml and changing the template attribute.
<block type="catalog/product_view_type_simple" name="product.info.simple" as="product_type_data" template="your/new/path.phtml">
Of course editing core files is a bad idea, so you should make a quick search for how to correctly add layout updates via either local.xml or customer layout update files.
I ended up figuring out what I needed to do. I simply wanted to add a small image to my product detail page that highlight a free shipping option. All I had to do was create a static block in the admin panel of magento and go into catalog>product>view.phtml file and insert:
getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId('your_block_id')->toHtml(); ?>
it worked like a charm!
thanks for the help Crags
I need news articles to be displayed on the front page but the standard way, to put this code {{block type="profile/profile" name="profile" template="profile/news-front.phtml"}} in the editor on backend doesn't work, even though I have created file news-front.phtml in the template/profile. I really-really need help with this. The output in system.log is Not valid template file:frontend/base/default/template/profile/news-front.phtml
Is the block type really going to be profile/profile? If you are just hoping to output the file as PHP/HTML you may want to consider using core/template rather than profile/profile.
For some reason when somebody performs a search on my site the search results do not display underneath the search box, they appear on the far left of the screen.
Any ideas of what file this would be configured in?
Let me correct myself it's not the search results but the search suggestions
I can't offer a direct solution to your problem, but turning on template hints might point you in the right direction. In the Admin, go to System > Configuration, Select your store view from the scope drop down at the top left. Unless you're running multi-store, or have changed the name of the default store it'll be called "Default Store View". Then scroll down to "Developer" and open up the "Debug" section. Turn on both Template Path Hints" and "Add Block Names to Hints". This will add a div with a red border around each template in your layout and a heading which includes the name of the template. It will liklely completely screw up your page layout, but will show you which template generated every tag on the page and help you track down the issue.
The DeveloperToolbar extension makes turning this on/off quickly much easier, but I wouldn't recommend deploying it to a production site.
Alan Storm's indispensable CommerceBug is another tool which is very handly for tracking down front end issues. CommerdeBug can show you the layout handles and the aggregate layout XML used to generate the current page. Both of which are useful for determing why a specific block was (or wasn't) included.
So in case anybody else runs into this or wants to move where their search suggestions display it is in styles.css under .searchautocomplete.