How to get catalog product data in Magento 1.8?

Question

I use these lines below to get the CMS page data,

// Get current cms page from Mage:getSingleton
$cms_id = Mage::getSingleton('cms/page')->getIdentifier();
$cms_title = Mage::getSingleton('cms/page')->getTitle();
$cms_content = Mage::getSingleton('cms/page')->getContent();
var_dump($cms_content);

What about if I want to get a catalog product data? I want to get the product's name for instance,

$_helper = $this->helper('catalog/output');
$product_id = Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product')->getIdentifier();
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product_id);
echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, $_product->getName(), 'name');

result,

Fatal error: Call to a member function getName() on a non-object in C:\wamp\www\mywebiste.com\app\design\frontend\mywebsite\default\template\page\html\banner.phtml on line 6

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The error basically means that the $product object is not an object, it is most likely null. I would check what is being returned from Mage::getSingleton('catalog/product')->getIdentifier();

If you are on a product page you can use Mage::registry('product')->getId() to get the id of the current product.

Or if you are simply wanting to load an arbitrary product then you can simply specify the id to use.