Question

I’m attempting to put a custom file containing featured items below the main product list on category pages on a Magento store.

I have edited catalog.xml to include:

    <block type="catalog/category_view" name="category.products" template="catalog/category/view.phtml">
        <block type="catalog/product_list" name="product_list" template="catalog/product/list.phtml">
        ...
        </block>
        <block type="catalog/product" name="featuredcat" as="featuredcat" template="customphp/featured-cat.phtml"/>
    </block>

featuredcat.phtml includes a loop looking for products with a custom attribute (featured) selected. This works lovely, and is already in the sidebar.

I then add:

echo $this->getChildHtml('featuredcat')

To the bottom of my catalog/category/view.phtml file. But nothing rendering. I could have sworn this would be correct. Can anyone shed light as to what I’m doing wrong?

Cheers.

Answer 1

The layout xml you have provided has the featuredcat block appended directly to the product_list block. So, you would have to call getChildHtml from within catalog/product/list.phtml and not catalog/category/view.phtml.

So, you can either move your getChildHtml call to the correct template as described above or move featuredcat block up a level:

<block type="catalog/category_view" name="category.products" template="catalog/category/view.phtml">
    <block type="catalog/product" name="featuredcat" as="featuredcat" template="customphp/featured-cat.phtml"/>
    <block type="catalog/product_list" name="product_list" template="catalog/product/list.phtml">
    ...
    </block>
</block>

Or you could keep your layout xml as is and use getChildChildHtml 🙂 – but I’m sure changing your layout is the better option –

<?php echo $this->getChildChildHtml('product_list', 'featuredcat') ?>