Magento Development Notes 3_PHP Tutorial

In this section, we focus on Layouts and Blocks in View.

Unlike other mainstream PHPMVC architectures, magento's ActionController does not pass data objects to the view, nor does it set properties in the View object. View obtains the information it needs through system modules.

The result of this design is that View is divided into Blocks and Templates. Blocks are PHP objects, and Templates are a mixture of PHP code and HTML (it can also be considered that PHP is used as a template language). Each Block is bound to a Template file. In a Phtml file, the PHP keyword $this will contain a reference to the Block corresponding to the Template.

Here is a quick example. View the template file app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalog/product/list.phtml

You will see the following code

getLoadedProductCollection() ?>

count()): ?>

__("There are no products matching the selection.")?>

The getLoadedProudctController can be found in the corresponding block file

app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List.php

public functiongetLoadedProductCollection()

{

return$this->_getProductCollection();

}

The _getProductCollection will instantiate models and get the data to the corresponding template.

Embedded Block

The real power of Blocks/Templates is the getChildHtml method. This allows us to include the secondary Block/Template in the main Block/Template (in xml format)

Blocks calling Blocks will form our entire HTMLlayout. Look at an example

App/design/frotend/base/default/template/page/1column.phtml

-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> getLang() ?>" lang=" getLang()?>"> getChildHtml('head') ?> getChildHtml('content') ?> getChildHtml('before_body_end') ?>

getAbsoluteFooter() ?>