In magento, how to hide header and footer in every page for specific category ID?

Question

I would like to know how to hide header and footer for specific category ID. For example, I have 5 categories: categories are cat1, cat2, cat3, cat4, cat5. I want to hide header and footer in every pages if the category id is equal to cat1. Is it possible to do so?

Answer 1

Simon has a good answer but you can also do this through the admin control panel in Magento using a custom layout update setting on the category editor:

• Log in to your admin console and visit Catalog > Manage Categories.
• Select the category you want to change in the left column.
• Click the "Custom Design" tab in the middle column.
• Set "Use Parent Category Settings" to "No"
• inside the "Custom Layout Update" box add the following:

<remove name="header" />

<remove name="footer" />

• Save the category's changes and go check your website.

This will affect the selected category and all it's child categories by default. If you later want to change another category, you can repeat these steps on that category. You can also re-edit this category and reverse these steps to change the design of that category back again.

disclaimer

I tested this on 1.7 and I have just assumed that the same functionality exists in whichever version you are using.

Answer 2

In addition to Simon's answer.
You can create a custom layout handle so you won't duplicate the code for every category.
Something like this:

<category_remove_header_footer>
    <remove name="header" />
    <remove name="footer" />
</category_remove_header_footer>

Then just use this handle in all the other category handles

<CATEGORY_1>
    <update handle="category_remove_header_footer" />
</CATEGORY_1>
<CATEGORY_2>
    <update handle="category_remove_header_footer" />
</CATEGORY_2>
....
<CATEGORY_5>
    <update handle="category_remove_header_footer" />
</CATEGORY_5>

Replace 1, 2..5 with the real category ids.
This could be useful if you later want to change something for all these categories. You can do it in one place for all of them.

An other cleaner approach would be to add a new attribute to the category entity called 'Hide header and footer' ( code hide_header_footer). It should be a 'Yes/No' attribute.
Then create the layout handle category_remove_header_footer as mentioned above and rewrite the method Mage_Catalog_CategoryController::viewAction and below

$update->addHandle('CATEGORY_' . $category->getId());

add this:

if ($category->getHideHeaderFooter()) {
    $update->addHandle('category_remove_header_footer');
}

This involves more code, but it seams cleaner and portable. You may later want other categories with no header or footer. With this approach you can set that from the backend, without coding anything else.

Answer 3

There are specific layout handles for each category with a specific ID. Mind that the ID is solely numeric. If the ID is 1, then you can do something like this in your local.xml:

<CATEGORY_1>
    <remove name="header"/>
    <remove name="footer"/>
</CATEGORY_1>

Answer 4

create on an event on catalog page render and remove the footer and header by observer

<events>
    <controller_action_predispatch_catalog_category_view>
            <observers> 
            <myredirect>
                <class>check/observer</class>
                <method>myremove</method>
            </myredirect>
        </observers>
    </controller_action_predispatch_catalog_category_view>

            </events>

and observer code is

public function myremove($observer)
    {
        try{
             if(Mage::registry('current_category'))
              $catId=Mage::registry('current_category')->getId();
              $specialCategoriesId=array('cat1','cat2',cat3);
               if (in_array($catId, $specialCategoriesId)) {
               $blockName = 'footer'; // Add yours
                $update = Mage::app()->getLayout()->getUpdate();
                $removeInstruction = "<remove name=\"$blockName\"/>";
              $update->addUpdate($removeInstruction);
             }

        }catch(Excpetion $e){
            Mage::log(print_r($e->getMessage(),1),'null','mage32173.log');
        }

        return;

    }