Magento: How to tell if you're on a category page, or product page in .phtml file(s)

Question

I am trying to program into my .phtml files an if statement if the guest is on a category list page, or on a product page.

For example this code:

<?= Mage::app()->getFrontController()->getRequest()->getRouteName(); ?>

Returns "catalog" whenever l'm on a page other than a CMS page.

Is there a way l can use a similar method to know if the user is looking at a root category, sub category or an individual product page?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

It's been a while since I've dealt with frontend catalog pages, but give this a try.

Current versions of Magento register certain global variables (not PHP globals, but things global to the Magento system) on certain pages.

Calling the following

$category = Mage::registry('current_category');         
$product  = Mage::registry('current_product');
$product  = Mage::registry('product');

will either return null if the objects haven't been set (i.e. you're on a page without a category or a product), or return category and product objects.

If a product object is returned you're on a product page.

If no product object is returned but a category object is, you're on a category page. Category objects have a method to getting the parent id

$category->getParentId()

A category without a parent id should be a top level category, categories with parent ids should be sub-categories.

That should give you what you need to identify where the current request is.

UPDATE: Coming back to this almost a decade later -- I likely would not rely on the contents of the registry alone to determine the page I'm on. Instead I'd use the full action name in combination with looking for the above the objects.

Answer 2

While Alan's answer will work, there is a more direct option, and you were actually on the right track with your code snippet... you just need to inspect the controller name rather than the module name:

<?php Mage::app()->getFrontController()->getRequest()->getControllerName(); ?>

That will return category or product based on their controllers being CategoryController.php and ProductController.php respectively.

This does assume that you've not installed any third-party modules that rewrite those controllers with their own.

Answer 3

I am not a big fan of checking if the current_category registry exists, because basically any controller could do this and it wouldn't necessarily mean it's a category. My way of doing it is a bit more robust:

$fullActionName = Mage::app()->getFrontController()->getAction()->getFullActionName();
if ($fullActionName == 'catalog_category_view') { 
    ...  //Category
}
elseif ($fullActionName == 'catalog_product_view') {
    ...  //Product
}

Answer 4

I am afraid you are trying to do it the wrong way. I might be wrong, because you have not explained what is it exactly that you want to achieve, but I would use the layout xml to include your block on a product page with a parameter (say product-page="1") and similiarly on a category page (category-page="1").

Then you would be able to tell if you are on a product page or category page by examining those parameters inside your block:

if($this->getProductPage()) {
  //this is a product page, do some stuff
}
elseif($this->getCategoryPage()) {
  //this is a category page, do some stuff
}

Differentiating between main and subcategory pages might be more difficult, the first thing that comes to mind is analysis of the request variables, but that is certainly not the best approach.