Alan Storm has a great module called Layoutviewer that is great for front-end developers. It allows you to see the layout that Magento will use to render a page. This can be useful to debug what layout updates have been applied to a page. One way or another, it usually ends up in most of my development sites.
Here is a nice little shell script you can copy-and-paste or download to easily add it to your project:
#/bin/bash
VIEWER_HTTP_DOWNLOAD="http://alanstorm.com/2005/projects/MagentoLayoutViewer.tar.gz"
If we are in the root, then we need to go into app/code/local.
if [ -f “index.php” ]; then
cd app/code/local;
fi
curl -so - $VIEWER_HTTP_DOWNLOAD | tar xvzf -
(
cat <<‘ConfigFile’
true
local
ConfigFile
) > ../../etc/modules/Allanstormdotcom_Layoutviewer.xml
Also, here is a little bookmarklet that you can use to show the formatted XML for a page using the installed module:
[Display Layout](javascript:window.location.href = window.location.protocol + ’//’ + window.location.hostname + window.location.pathname + (window.location.search==” ? ‘?showLayout=page&showLayoutFormat=text’ : window.location.search + ’& showLayout=page&showLayoutFormat=text’);)
Just drag it to your bookmarks bar!
You can also download the attached shell script. It will (from the htdocs folder for your Magento site) download the layoutviewer module.