Magento 1.9: Creating a page for just 1 product

Question

I am trying to create a view for just 1 product, a gift card. We want some special front-end code to display some variable options for a gift card.

We have a gift card product type and it comes to some special options for selecting a price value. So the functionality of user-selected values is already coded.

I just want to take that product type and give it a spiffy front end without disrupting the other products.

We already have a product template, and it has some components that i need to remove. This is the path of our product view:

app/design/frontend/vendor/vendor/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

There's also a:

app/design/frontend/vendor/vendor/template/catalog/giftcard/price.phtml

(and other pages)

If someone could give me a high-level idea of steps I need to take, I would very much appreciate it.

Answer 1

You can try the product layout update for your spiffy html. Navigate to the product page in the admin > Catalog > Manage Products > search and click on the product. Then on the product page, click on Design on the left tabs. In the Custom Layout Update

<reference name="product.info">
    <action method="setTemplate"><template>vendor/catalog/product/spiffyView.phtml</template></action>
</reference>

In the the above example, the phtml file is located in

app/design/frontend/base/default/template/vendor/catalog/product/spiffyView.phtml

where vendor is a custom module name. To simplify testing, you can create a very simple 2-liner phtml file such as

<?php // super simple product template ?>
<?php $_product = $this->getProduct(); ?>
<h1><?php echo $_product->getSku() ?></h1>

Answer 2

I added the below line to: app/design/frontend/vendor/vendor/layout/giftcard.xml

<catalog_product_view>
    <reference name="product.info">
        <action method="setTemplate">
             <!-- NEW CODE -->
             <template>giftcard/view.phtml</template>
             <!-- END NEW CODE -->
        </action>
    </reference>
</catalog_product_view>

And removed:

<template>vendor_giftcard/catalog/price.phtml</template>

I copied page/view.phtml, removed the stuff I don't want, and created a new view.phtml template.

frontend/vendor/vendor/template/catalog/product/view.phtml is inherited by default and is not explicitly defined which was what was giving me trouble because I could not find the inclusion of it.

There is another view defined in the giftcard.xml called price.phtml and this handles the rendering of the form components for the giftcards.

Basically I need to add my new view, then add in the form components from the price.phtml view.

That's where I'm at. Understanding the basics of Magento's XML Templating system.