Magento

You may find that you want to add additional layout template options to the CMS section that can be chosen when creating or editing a page in the admin interface.

Create a new template file in the following directory (you may want to simply copy an existing template, such as 1column.phtml) and name it with an appropriate name (ie: home.phtml if that template will be used for your home page).

app/design/frontend/YOUR_INTERFACE/YOUR_THEME/template/page/

whereas YOUR_INTERFACE typically remains “default” and YOUR_THEME can also be “default” (please see Design-Guide about proper naming of themes and interfaces)

In order to customize the configuration of Magento without hacking into existing files we need to create a new module. This is very simple. The module will only contain a configuration file that updates the section that lists the available templates for the CMS.

We’ll call the module Banana (just a example) and its package name Fruit (also just an example).

Note: You may (and probably should) choose a different module/package name, just be consistent throughout the process.

We need to tell Magento about our new module, so create a new file:

app/etc/modules/Fruit_Banana.xml

with the following content:

Now we need to actually create the module itself. Create the following file (and the neccessary folder structure):

app/code/local/Fruit/Banana/etc/config.xml

with the following content:

The capitalized parts need to be filled in by you.

Any new layouts you want to add should to be in the following format:

Using the same steps, and modifying them for each template, you can create new layout templates for use on any CMS page.

Also, take a look at the config.xml of the Page module in the Mage package; it defines the layouts that come with Magento:

app/code/core/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml

On line ~47(version 1.5.1.0) find:

If you don’t care for updating Magento and love hacking core files (something you generally shouldn’t do, unless you know what you’re doing) you can also just update this file (app/code/core/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml). Beware though that Magento updates can override the changes you’ve made.