Question

I want to keep right and left sidebar with all the pages but without any content.

How do I assign 3-column layout for all magento pages in once and keep those both sidebar without any content.

Thanks

Answer 1

Not all layouts are determined in the same places, so it’s not simple to change every page into a 3-column layout. The default layout for Magento 1.5 is three-column, which you can see in the default theme’s page.xml layout file. Other pages, though, override this setting (I count a few dozen in my base install using this command:

ack "columns" | grep phtml | wc -l

If you want to change those pages, create a local.xml layout file, and override each instance like this. Original tag:

<catalogsearch_advanced_index translate="label">
    <label>Advanced Search Form</label>
    <!-- Mage_Catalogsearch -->
    <reference name="root">
        <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
    </reference> 
    ...
</catalogsearch_advanced_index>

In your local.xml file:

<catalogsearch_advanced_index>
    <reference name="root">
        <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/3columns.phtml</template></action>
    </reference> 
</catalogsearch_advanced_index>

Be aware that this will probably break some pages and will require some fixes. Next, take a look at your CMS pages. They have layouts defined in the database, so you’ll want to change each of those over to three-column as well.

Finally, to update your columns to remove all content from them, Add this to your local.xml file (untested, but I remember this working in the past):

<default>
    <reference name="left">
        <action method="unsetChildren"></action>
    </reference>
    <reference name="right">
        <action method="unsetChildren"></action>
    </reference>
</default>

If you have trouble keeping the other columns “open” without content, you could also add a new block as a child to each of them with some content to keep them from collapsing.

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Joe