How to overwrite a template that's already overwritten in another module?

Question

I'm trying to overwrite the catalog list template in a custom module. That template is already being overwritten by another module in one specific magento implementation. How can I write my module to play nicely with that module if it's installed, and still work the same if the other module is not installed?

I.e. if I copy the other module's template file and modify that, then my module won't work without the other module installed. And if I copy the base template and modify that, then the other module won't work.

How do I get around this?

Answer 1

Magento 1 answer

That depends ;)

I assume that module has additional methods that are called in the template and then cause an error if the given module is not installed?

if the module works with the data array of varien object, for getters for example you could call getData('custom_module_value') instead of getCustomModuleValue() in your template.

But if the modules template calls some 'real' method, I think you would have to implement a condition that asks if the module is installed.

You can do this in 2 ways I think:

1. would be an easy if in the template (but seems not really nice since it adds complexity to your template): <?php if(Mage::helper('core')->isModuleEnabled('MyCompany_MyModule')): ?>

2. would be, to create a helper, that wraps that function above, and then set the template based on the result of the helper method with something like this in the layout:

<block type="module/block" name="myblock">
  <action method="setTemplate">
       <template helper="mymodule/myhelper/getTemplatePath"/>
  </action>
</block>