Magento Static Blocks – The Definitive Guide
Magento Static Block
There’s more than one way to skin a hippo and adding CMS static blocks in Magento is no exception.
In case you’re unfamiliar with CMS static blocks, they are powerful little buggers in Magento’s admin that allows the site’s administrator to add and control chunks of HTML that can be displayed throughout the site. They’re perfect for seasonal banners, sale blocks, return policies, size charts and anything that would make sense to modularize to make maintaining your site easier.
But wait, aren’t there already ‘callouts’ in Magento? Well, if you’re talking about those annoying graphics of the dog and chalkboard that take editing multiple files to update then yes. Magento’s built-in callouts are a terrible way of handling regularly updated content.
Your Magento website should be as updatable as possible to keep you from getting phone calls every time a client wants to advertise a new sale. Which is exactly why we want to control these blocks from the admin. Keep in mind Magento’s upcoming release of 1.4 will be implementing a WYSIWIG editor so clients can handle their own changes instead of pestering you.