Often you want to display customer testimonials on an e-Commerce site. With Magento, you can simply create a CMS block, add your testimonial text and display it in the left or right sidebar. That’s easy but also boring for site visitors since they will only ever see the one testimonial.

Of course, you can create several CMS blocks and show them on different pages but still, they will always be “glued” to the pages you set them to.

The next logical idea is to work out a way to display a random testimonial on every page refresh. In the first part of this tutorial series, I will show you a quick way using a .phtml file and layouts. In the second part, I’m going to turn what I covered here into a Magento extension with a few nifty enhancements.

To achieve our intent, we will need to accomplish the following:

1. Create a phtml file which will display our CMS block
2. Create a CMS block “on the fly” in our code
3. Work out how to designate which CMS blocks contain our testimonials
4. Set where to show the block

The first task is easy, simply create a folder in your template:

app/design/frontend/YOUR-PACKAGE/YOUR-THEME/template/myrandom/

Create your empty phtml file, say, random_testimonial.phtml.

Point number two is pretty straight forward too. A quick web search will give you plenty of pointers on how to dynamically create Magento blocks in code (within a phtml file):

$this->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId( [block_identifier] );

The third task is to work out some convenient naming convention for your CMS block identifiers. For example, you could designate a specific prefix to your blocks you want to be part of the gambling game, like: “testimonial”.

So, create several blocks with block ID’s of:

testimonial-1
testimonial-2
testimonial-3
etc

Before we move onto point four, we need to fill in the code for our phtml template now:

<?php
$_block = $this->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId($this->getIdentifier().mt_rand(1, $this->getNumber()));
if ($_block) :
?>
<div class="block block-testimonial">
    <div class="block-title">
        <strong><?php echo $this->getTitle(); ?></strong>
    </div>
    <div class="block-content">
    <?php echo $_block->toHtml(); ?>
    </div>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

You’ll notice that we have some additional properties like Title, Identifier and Number.

It will become apparent in the next step where the values for these properties come from. Now, we can decide where to call the phtml block from.

We have several options:

1. Layout XML

Edit one of your layout XML files, for example, catalog.xml, find the element: <catalog_product_view> and within the <reference name="left"> block add:

<block type="core/template" name="random.testimonial" template="myrandom/random_testimonial.phtml">
    <action method="setTitle"><title>What Customers Say...</title></action>
    <action method="setIdentifier"><identifier>testimonial-</identifier></action>
    <action method="setNumber"><number>3</number></action>
</block>

Let’s see what’s happening here. We are using some Magento “magic” methods to set our introduced properties like the aforementioned Title, Identifier and Number effectively passing values for these properties to our .phtml block. This means we don’t have to edit our .phtml every time we need to change these properties.

2. Layout Update

You can insert the same XML as above into one of the layout update fields in your Magento CMS pages, products or categories.

If we insert the XML into one of our category layout updates:



3. CMS page block

For this approach, we will use the Magento curly braces syntax to insert the block into the page itself. This is useful if you want to drop a random testimonial into your customer services pages, for example.

Simply insert:

{{block type="core/template" template="myrandom/random_testimonial.phtml" number="2" title="Others Say:" identifier="testimonial-"}}

Where you want the block to show and save.

Remember, you can create different .phtml templates depending on the layout you need and include them in a variety of areas in your site.

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