How to manage home page sidebar blocks

This tutorial will show you how to manage the sidebar blocks in Magento.

 

Home Page blocks.

Home page blocks in Magento are controlled by the Magento administration panel. So all change should be done there.

1. Open Magento admin panel

2. Go to CMS > Pages > Home Page

3. Open the Design tab, in the Layout Update XML field you can see the home page blocks code.

 

Here are some examples:

 

Popular Tags block

   <block  type="tag/popular" name="tags_popular"  template="tag/popular.phtml"/> 

 

Community Poll block

   <block  type="poll/activePoll" name="right.poll">   <action method="setPollTemplate"><template>poll/active.phtml</template><type>poll</type></action>   <action method="setPollTemplate"><template>poll/result.phtml</template><type>results</type></action>   </block> 

 

Newsletter Sign-Up block

   <block  type="newsletter/subscribe" name="left.newsletter"  template="newsletter/subscribe.phtml"/> 

 

Sidebar callout(banner) block

 <block  type="core/template" name="left.permanent.callout"  template="callouts/left_col.phtml">   <action  method="setImgSrc"><src>images/media/col_left_callout.jpg</src></action>   <action  method="setImgAlt" translate="alt"  module="catalog"><alt>iPod  classic</alt></action>   <action  method="setLinkUrl"><url>storage.html</url></action>   </block> 

 

You can change the blocks order or delete any of the blocks editing the XML code.