Dynamically hide header/footer for a static page

Question

I have some static pages on the site which will be rendered on mobile site as well. I will be serving these pages from the desktop application. To make it mobile design friendly, I need to hide the header and footer from the pages. These pages are cms pages, product pages etc..I can have the mobile pass some parameter in the URL to identify the referrer(cant use server referrer variable). example.com/comingfrom/mobile/privacypolicy.html.

From admin I tried adding

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

under custom layout update xml and it worked fine but this removes header/footer forever. Where in the code I need to place this information? Which layout file to update? Thanks!

Answer 1

It seems like an awkward approach. You would probably be better off making the header and footer responsive.

In lieu of that, you could rewrite or replace those blocks with your own versions. In the block class's constructor, you can then check for a parameter in the URL and then set something like $this->setIsMobile(true) followed by a check in the template: $isMobile = $this->getIsMobile() - then simply alter your template to display what you like based on the state of $isMobile.

So if you check for mobile in the block's constructor, and mobile is true, you can then just not load the block or otherwise add some mobile content to the block in the template