Baobaz Blog

Magento natively integrates CMS features.

Two types of objects are available to allow you to create content in Magento:

• Pages, which allow you to display general information such as your terms of sale, contact information, store locations, et cetera.
• Static blocks ( "static" is not quite the appropriate term as discussed below, it means that the content of these blocks is editable directly from the back-office, without modifying php source code), which allow you to enter information to be usually displayed on several pages, such as footers, headers, but also specific informations (predictive site shut down, promotions ...).

Note that these objects, static pages or blocks, may contain elements dynamically calculated and it is relatively easy to make create new ones for the webmaster (for instance to display current date and time, number of online customers, last item sold...).

Furthermore, these blocks and pages can also contain other blocks, static (ie, whose content is changed here) or not (block articles, bestsellers block ...).

Finally, these pages and blocks fit perfectly into the Magento architecture: for the same page or static block identifier, you can (but do not have to) create one version per View Store. It becomes very easy to create specific content for each language and the system will display the version corresponding to the language of the customer without you having wrote a single line of code.

Of course the system is not without fault and we can regret:

• The lack of a rich text editing tool,
• The inability to manage hierarchical content,
• The lack of online form management.

We shall see very soon how to find a workaround these deficiencies.

As we know magento has quite powerful templates system. The same thing we can say about logic part. In general magento consists of about 50 modules. There is module for checkout, for customer, for cms pages etc. Module consists of few parts - beside design parts there are: components, blocks, models and  helpers. Components contains all actions that happen when the module is used.  When we have url http://www.my-eshop.tld/index.php/a/b/c

it means that module a must run action c in controller b.

Blocks are responsible for preparing data for templates. Each template used must have it's block. Sometimes blocks are simple, sometimes they can be more complicated. Anyway in some situations it's useful to move data from controller to block so we won't have to calculate it few times in one request.

For that we can use possibility that magento gives us - registering data.

In controller we store our data in variable called $data, we can save it to register like this:

Then in block file, you can get all this data, back using.

It's a small feature that can be very useful sometimes.