Add script tag to magento layout.xml

Question

I'm currently developing a eCommerce system with Magento. I have my footer called as

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('footer') ?>

and my layout.xml has following tags to define the 'footer'

<reference name="footer">
  <block type="page/footer" name="footer">
    <action method="setTemplate">
      <template>page/html/footer_home.phtml</template>
    </action>
    <action method="setTemplate">
      <template>muaw/footer_script.phtml</template>
    </action>
  </block>
</reference>

footer_home.phtml is the actual footer and footer_script.phtml is a file with <script> tag for some jquery. My problem is that adding the second set of <action> tags for footer_script.phtml replace the actual footer. Is there any other way to get both files?

Answer 1

Ok so the setTemplate method sets the template on the parent block in this case name="footer". As it can only have one template that is then overwritten by the second method call.

What you need to do is something like this:

<reference name="footer"> 
    <block type="page/footer" name="footer"> 
        <action method="setTemplate"> 
            <template>page/html/footer_home.phtml</template> 
        </action>
        <block type="core/template name="footer_script" template="muaw/footer_script.phtml"/>
     </block>
</reference>

That will set the main template for the footer to page/html/footer_home.phtml and give it a child block of muaw/footer_script.phtml.

You then need to call that child block from within muaw/footer_script.phtml by adding this code to it: <?php echo $this->getChildHtml("footer_script");?>

If you want to seperate the two blocks you can add a seperate block for each and then call then from within the footer template.