Question

Somehow the review section / tab on my product pages is not showing up.
The Reviews tab section is totally empty. What could be the culprit?

I have enabled ‘Price’, ‘Quailty’ and ‘Value’ in Catalog -> Manage Ratings and refreshed all cache. But it still doesn’t show up.

And I checked the catalog.xml in the layout folder of the current theme and the ‘reviews’ section IS there:

<action method="addTab" translate="title" module="review">
    <alias>reviews</alias>
    <title>Reviews</title>
    <block>review/product_view_list</block>
    <template>review/product/view/list_tab.phtml</template>
</action>

And I double checked, /home/my_user/public_html/app/design/frontend/default/my_theme/template/review/product/view/list_tab.phtml is there and the content of it seems quite all right. It’s the review and rating form no problem.

I installed some other themes on princessly.com. Could it be them that some of the template / layout files got overwritten?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Problem solved. Just as I suspected, it is one of the other themes that has a module getting higher in the templating priority than that of the current theme. Renamed that module’s directory name and refreshed cache. Now the reviews section is correctly showing up.

Magento is much too flexible in customizing the whole store. Unlike WordPress, where a theme has no privileges other than residing in ONE folder, Magento themes come with folders and files that can overwrite almost the entire installation, making them easily entangle with each other, resulting in unpredictable problems that are hard to trace.

Recommended practice is to install as less themes on the same Magento installation as possible. I just installed 2 and that’s enough for this problem to occur that wasted me 5 hours.