does magento load up all blocks and functionality that comes in standard right or left unless explicitly disabled?

Question

i'm working on a custom theme for our magento based site, we're using latest available enterprise edition 1.13.1.0 and i wanted to find out if we need to explicitly disable functionality via the layout xml files for all blocks that we don't use on our pages?

ie - we don't use any ecommerce and poll functions (shopping cart, checkout, etc.) - and our template is 1 column throughout the entire site. do we need to turn off all shopping cart related functions on the layout pages or do those functions not get processed until they actually are called?

thank you.

Answer 1

If you remove the left and right block:

<layout>
    <default>
        <remove name="left" />
        <remove name="right" />
    </default>
</layout>

They don't get processed.

If you only remove the call from the template (like changing the template to 1-column.phtml, then the blocks get instantiated but toHtml() is not called. So adding the above lines to your layout xml should be enough.