Knowledge Base

How to use the magento block in other application

Presently, many entrepreneurs are using ecommerce business with several other non ecommerce applications to make their presence online. Since magento have MVC architecture, its fairly simple to grab the magento block and include them in other PHP applications.

Example of using magento block in a non-magento application is magento wordpress plugin integration. We can use it with other application with joomla, drupal and other cms as per our requirements.

There are two main thing that we need to manage.
1-Initialize the magento
2-include the block

Initialize the magento

We need to do these step only once,preferably earlier in the execution of the application.We are going to load the magento bootstrap file and load the magento framework

include ‘/path/to/magento/app/Mage.php’;
umask(0);
Mage::app();

Now there is few extra step,that way we can correctly use its blocks

Mage::getSingleton(‘core/translate’)->setLocale(Mage::app()->getLocale()->getLocaleCode())->init(‘frontend’, true);
Mage::getSingleton(‘core/session’, array(‘name’ =’frontend’));
Mage::getSingleton(“checkout/session”);
Mage::getDesign()
// Set the package, usually “default” or “enterprise”
->setPackageName(‘enterprise’)
// Set the theme, usually “default”
->setTheme(‘default’);
$layout = Mage::app()->getLayout();
$module = Mage::app()->getRequest()->getModuleName();
if (!$module)
{
$customerSession = Mage::getSingleton(‘customer/session’);

$layout->getUpdate()->addHandle(‘default’)->addHandle($customerSession->isLoggedIn()? ‘customer_logged_in’: ‘customer_logged_out’)->load();
$layout->generateXml()->generateBlocks();

}

That’s it magento is now loaded and we are ready to include the block.

Including the layout blocks

To include a block created through Magento’s layout system all you need is the name. For instance, we can find the Magento header in layout/page.xml

…









Page Header
top-container

Now we have the name like “header” that we can include the block as

echo $layout->getBlock(‘header’)->toHtml();

Including Static Blocks

Including a CMS static block is very simple. All you need is the identifier. For instance, if we had a block called “home-slider”

echo $layout->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘home-slider’)->toHtml();