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Magento: Standard OOP Still Applies

astorm

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This entry is part 15 of 43 in the series Miscellaneous Magento Articles. Earlier posts include Magento Front Controller, Reinstalling Magento Modules, Clearing the Magento Cache, Magento's Class Instantiation Abstraction and Autoload, Magento Development Environment, Logging Magento's Controller Dispatch, Magento Configuration Lint, Slides from Magento Developer's Paradise, Generated Magento Model Code, Magento Knowledge Base, Magento Connect Role Directories, Magento Base Directories, PHP Error Handling and Magento Developer Mode, and Magento Compiler Mode. Later posts include Magento: Debugging with Varien Object, Generating Google Sitemaps in Magento, IE9 fix for Magento, Magento's Many 404 Pages, Magento Quickies, Commerce Bug in Magento CE 1.6, Welcome to Magento: Pre-Innovate, Magento's Global Variable Design Patterns, Magento 2: Factory Pattern and Class Rewrites, Magento Block Lifecycle Methods, Goodnight and Goodluck, Magento Attribute Migration Generator, Fixing Magento Flat Collections with Chaos, Pulse Storm Launcher in Magento Connect, StackExchange and the Year of the Site Builder, Scaling Magento at Copious, Incremental Migration Scripts in Magento, A Better Magento 404 Page, Anatomy of the Magento PHP 5.4 Patch, Validating a Magento Connect Extension, Magento Cross Area Sessions, Review of Grokking Magento, Imagine 2014: Magento 1.9 Infinite Theme Fallback, Magento Ultimate Module Creator Review, Magento Imagine 2014: Parent/Child Themes, Early Magento Session Instantiation is Harmful, Using Squid for Local Hostnames on iPads, and Magento, Varnish, and Turpentine.

One trap a lot of people (myself included) fall into with Magento is forgetting that sometimes the best solution is just basic, standard PHP OOP. There was a Stack Overflow question where this came up in the comments, and I figured I’d wrangle a blog post out of it.

So, is sounds like the original poster wants to conditionally change the appearance of the customer_account_login page. If we take a look at the layout XML, we can see this is a pretty simple page.

<reference name="content">
    <block type="customer/form_login" name="customer_form_login" template="customer/form/login.phtml"/>
</reference>

The Layout Update XML gets a reference to the content block, and then adds a customer/form_login block to the page. The poster’s solution to this was to setup an observer that would look for a particular handle, and then manipulate the layout directly.

A simpler approach would be to remove the block that’s been added, re-add another customer block, and then include code in that custom block to conditionally change the appearance of the page.

Note: This is slightly tipsy pseudo code, so problems and corrections are appreciated

First step, add this to a module’s XML Layout file (or local.xml, if you’re just working locally)

<customer_account_login>
    <reference name="content">
        <action method="removeChild"><name>customer_form_login</name></action>
        <block type="yourmodule/form_login" name="customer_form_login" template="customer/form/login.phtml"/>
    </reference>
</customer_account_login>

This removed the customer login block, and then immediately re-adds it using a different block alias. You’ll want to make sure this is added after the customer XML is (using the module’s before/after attributes to control loading order). Then, in your Module, add a custom block

class Youtpackage_Yourmodule_Block_Form_Login extends Mage_Customer_Block_Form_Login
{
}

The key here is our “new” block extends the old block. Mage_Customer_Block_Form_Login is the Block class for the alias customer/form_login. As our imaginary module stands right now, our login page should function exactly the same as the existing module, since our new block inherits all the old Block’s behavior.

There’s numerous ways to complete our task at this point. A good old fashioned override of _toHtml should do the trick

class Youtpackage_Yourmodule_Block_Form_Login extends Mage_Customer_Block_Form_Login
{
    protected function _toHtml()
    {
        $config = Mage::getStoreConfig('path/to/config');
        switch($config)
        {
            case 'foo':
                $this->setTemplate('foo/baz/bar.phtml');
                break;
            case 'baz':
                $this->setTemplate('foo/baz/bar.phtml');
                break;
            default:
                //do nothing, maintain existing behavior, which will
                //we old module's behavior.
        }

        return parent::_toHtml();
    }
}

We use the config value to determine which custom template to set (changing the appearance), or if a specific value isn’t found, we do nothing and the old behavior is maintained.

Wrapup

A trip through Magento’s deeper abstractions is always worthwhile, but don’t forget that the systems exist for a reason. Often the complicated solution you’re looking for can be solved with some good old fashioned PHP coding, sans the abstract design patterns.

Originally published February 16, 2011
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Copyright © Alana Storm 1975 – 2023 All Rights Reserved

Originally Posted: 16th February 2011

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